Florida Panthers Penalty Kill Suffocating The Lightning

Florida Panthers head coach Paul Maurice said he hasn’t sat in on a penalty kill meeting since November of last year.

“I sit in the first one at the start of a series so I get an idea of what they’re trying to do, so I don’t screw it up,” Maurice said.

Weird. But hey, if it works, right?

And work, it has. The Panthers had their hands full on Thursday when the Tampa Bay Lightning went on five power plays. Holding onto a 1-0 lead for much of Game 2, the Panthers penalty kill had zero room for error. The Lightning came into this first round series with the fifth-best power play in the league, converting on 25.9 percent of their chances.

The end result: Five-for-five on the kill, allowing two shots across nine minutes of Lightning power plays.

“I thought we defended really well,” Panthers center Anton Lundell said. “We didn’t give too much to them. We were pretty aggressive. And then we had Bob.”

Sergei Bobrovsky stopped all 19 shots he faced.

The Panthers are 7-for-8 on the penalty kill in this series.

“Credit to (Panthers general manager) Bill Zito and his group,” Maurice said. “We went into the trade deadline feeling that that was the place that we needed to get better again. We lost some important killers from our team last year, and he delivered.”

One of those acquisitions was Seth Jones, a defenseman the Panthers got from the Chicago Blackhawks in exchange for goaltender Spencer Knight. The 30-year-old has been a vital part of the Panthers penalty kill over the last two months. Florida ended the year with the tenth-best penalty kill in the league, killing off opponent penalties at an 80.7 percent clip.

What makes it more impressive is they’re doing it without defenseman Aaron Ekblad. The top penalty-killing defenseman was suspended for 20 games on March 10 for violating the terms of the NHL/NHLPA Performance Enhancing Substances Program.

Now, the Panthers get him back for Game 3 in Sunrise on Saturday, already holding onto a 2-0 series lead.