SUNRISE, Fla. -- Matthew Tkachuk and the Florida Panthers have experienced a lot in making two consecutive trips to the Stanley Cup Final, so it was not surprising to hear him give such an honest assessment of their 3-0 victory against the Edmonton Oilers in Game 1 at Amerant Bank Arena on Saturday.
“I guess it feels good,” Tkachuk said. “It's always good to get a win, but we’ve got a lot of things to clean up and to get better at. They played well and we played well enough to win, just really grinded it out and played really well defensively.”
Tkachuk didn’t mention Sergei Bobrovsky in that answer but had previously credited the goalie as being a major factor in the victory. Bobrovsky made 32 saves for his third career Stanley Cup Playoff shutout and was particularly good in erasing Florida’s mistakes early. The Panthers were outshot 12-4 in the first period but emerged from it leading 1-0 on Carter Verhaeghe’s goal at 3:59.
Although the Panthers got better as the game progressed and played their best in the third period when protecting a 2-0 lead, they also know they have plenty of room for improvement ahead of Game 2 of the best-of-7 series on Monday (8 p.m. ET; ABC, ESPN+, SN, TVAS, CBC).
“I think definitely we can be better,” Verhaeghe said. “There’s always things we can improve on. I think after a week [off before Game 1], we’ll take a win any way we can get it. But they outshot us, they had a lot more chances than us. We shut it down, played good defensively, but there’s lots of things we can improve on.”