Winning three of their first four games this season, the Panthers improved to 3-1-0 with a 4-3 win over the Philadelphia Flyers in their Home Opener in Sunrise on Wednesday. Getting the party started, Carter Verhaeghe scored a pair of goals to give Florda an early 2-0 advantage.
"We got a couple early ones," Verhaeghe said. "It was nice to get on top at home."
Offseason additions Rudolfs Balcers and Josh Mahura each scored their first goals with the Panthers in the third period against the Flyers to lock down the win, while Sergei Bobrovsky stopped 30 shots - including 18 over the final frame - to shut the door and improve to 2-1-0.
Dishing out two assists, Matthew Tkachuk became just the fifth player in Panthers history to start his tenure with the club on point streak of at least four games. Tkachuk leads the team in scoring with six points (two goals, four assists). Not too far behind on the scoring leaderboard, Aleksander Barkov, Gustav Forsling, Sam Bennett and Colin White have all logged four points.
After missing the last two games with an upper-body injury, defenseman Brandon Montour will return to Florida's lineup tonight.
"Everyone did a fantastic job stepping in," Verhaeghe said after beating Philadelphia. "Everyone was making fantastic plays, and it was nice to get the win right off the hop here. … I can't say enough good things about Bob. Every game it seems like he makes a huge save. He was dialed in. He's our backbone back there. It's so much confidence for us as players to have him in net."
Struggling a bit out of the gate, the Lightning sits at 1-3-0 and enter tonight's matchup on the heels of a 3-2 loss to the Flyers on Tuesday. After taking a 2-0 lead on a pair of goals from Steven Stamkos in the second period, Tampa Bay then surrendered three answered goals to Philadelphia to watch a potential two points transform into zero in seemingly the blink of an eye.
"This is a stinger," Lightning coach Jon Cooper said. "We should never leave this game with zero points ... probably should have left with two. This group should close that game out, and we didn't. That's probably a little bit of a concern."
That loss marked the third time in four games that the Lightning - which ranked tied for seventh in the NHL last season on offense - scored two or fewer goals. Of the club's 11 goals scored so far this season, six have come from Stamkos. No other player has scored more than one goal. Stamkos also leads Tampa Bay in scoring with seven points, while Nikita Kucherov ranks second with five, and Vladislav Namestnikov and Victor Hedman have each notched three.
Tied with Bobrovsky for the most wins in the NHL in 2021-22 with 39, Andrei Vasilevskiy, who made 21 saves against the Flyers, has gone 1-2-0 with a .912 save percentage this season.
After winning back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2020 and 2021, the Lightning's bid for a three-peat fell short when they lost to the Colorado Avalanche in six games in the 2022 Stanley Cup Final.
"Probably take things for granted with this team just for the past decade, what's gone on," Cooper said. "Early on in this first week and half, two weeks, it's not going the way we're used to it going. We have to fight through it, you've got to man up."
