Getting the Rangers on the board in the second period, Kaapo Kakko crashed the net as Sergei Bobrovsky was trying cover the puck and poked it into the cage to make it 2-1 at 8:50. With that line doing even more damage, Alexis Lafrenière then beat Bobrovsky to tie game 2-2 at 18:15.
Less than two minutes into the third period, the Rangers took their first lead with their third straight goal when Patrick Kane's attempted cross-ice pass was batted out of the air and past Bobrovsky by a Panthers player for an own-goal that suddenly put New York on top 3-2 at 1:22.
"They took over," Barkov said of the response from New York. "Playing against good teams, they're going to have their momentum and stuff. They played well in the second period and in the third period they defended well. They didn't give us that much. We played against a good team. They won the game today. Now we've just got to regroup and move on."
Making it four straight for the boys from the Big Apple, Filip Chytil got behind the defense, pounced on a dribbling puck in the offensive zone and beat Bobrovsky on a breakaway to put the Rangers on top 4-2 at 6:18. But less than a minute later, Barkov, after winning a key draw, answered for the Panthers when he buried a shot from on top of the crease to cut the deficit to 4-3 at the 7-minute mark.
From there, the Rangers locked it down and rode out the game until the clock hit zero.
When asked about the loss, Panthers head coach Paul Maurice said he felt players were gripping their sticks a bit too tight and trying to make plays that weren't there at times. In order to bounce back, he wants to see them relax a bit and rise to the occasion moving forward.
"Everybody's going through the exact same thing," Maurice said. "Enjoy the fact that you put yourself back in the fight. To come back from nine [points] back [in the standings] to be fairly close to even is a great challenge that they met, and now we've got to embrace that [new] challenge and enjoy it and not let it tighten us up."
