LOS ANGELES – Sam Reinhart scored again, but the Florida Panthers saw their winning streak snapped at five games with a 2-1 loss to the Los Angeles Kings at Crypto.com Arena on Thursday.
“We were able to stick with it and give ourselves a fighting chance,” said Reinhart, who’s currently tied for first in the NHL with 13 goals. “You give them credit, they’re a team that when they have the lead it’s not easy to come back on them. I think they were a little bit more assertive early on, a little bit quicker on pucks. We fell behind. [We need to] just come out with that mentality earlier.”
Still sitting pretty at 10-5-1 in the standings, the Panthers certainly played well enough to come out on top in the City of Angels, but were kept in check by a hot goaltender and a stingy penalty kill.
Going 0-for-5 on the power play, the Panthers had 11 scoring chances and 1.55 expected goals with the man advantage against the Kings, but simply couldn’t get anything past Cam Talbot.
Of Talbot’s 30 saves, 10 came on the penalty kill.
“We had a few good chances to score,” captain Aleksander Barkov said when asked about coming up empty with the extra attacker. “I don’t think we did anything bad there. We moved the puck, we got pucks to the net and we had some chances. We just have to stick with it.”
Jumping on the Panthers right after the puck dropped, the Kings struck just 1:20 into the game when Kevin Fiala lifted a backhand shot over Sergei Bobrovsky on a 2-on-1 rush to make it 1-0.
Adding to the lead for Los Angeles in the second period, Anze Kopitar teed up a pass from Fiala on the power play and blasted a one-timer into the twine from the slot to make it 2-0 at 13:53.
Playing with five defenseman for much of the middle frame, Josh Mahura was not the bench to start the period for the Panthers. Although he briefly came back for one shift from 8:13-9:36, he then exited again and did not return due to what is being labeled as a lower-body injury.
“We don’t think it’s significant, but we won’t know more until tomorrow,” head coach Paul Maurice said.
Finally breaking through for the Panthers in the third period, Reinhart, the NHL’s reigning First Star of the Week, took a pass from Carter Verhaeghe and fired an absolute rocket of a shot past Talbot from the inner half of the right circle to cut the deficit down to 2-1 at 11:45.
