7:30 ET, Florida at New Jersey, Game 6 (NBC Sports Network) | Preview
With the way this season and these playoffs have gone, it seems only fitting that the Florida Panthers would be the next team with a chance to advance out of the first round of the playoffs. That's exactly what they'll do if they can pull out a win on Tuesday night in New Jersey.
When the Phoenix Coyotes wrapped up their series win over the Blackhawks on Monday night, they snapped their 25-year drought between playoff series wins, passing the torch to the Panthers, who have to go back to the 1996 run to the Stanley Cup Finals for a playoff series win.
But first they have to win a game and they'll have two shots at doing it.
There hasn’t been any real recipe for success in this series for either team. At times they have received very good goaltending (both Jose Theodore and Martin Brodeur have a shutout), the games have all had ebbs and flows, spurts where one team has looked particularly dominant. Most of those have come from the Devils, who just have more firepower to score in bursts than Florida.
But the Panthers will be without Theodore on Thursday night. The team revealed that they recalled top prospect Jacob Markstrom from San Antonio of the AHL on Thursday morning and Scott Clemmensen will get the start.
The one constant in this series has been that one team has built a 3-0 lead, maybe as remarkable as the Bruins and Capitals only playing one-goal games. But not even that has guaranteed success. Remember Game 3 in New Jersey when the Panthers came back from that 3-0 hole to win 4-3 and stun the Devils. But that was an anomaly. Panthers coach Kevin Dineen knows how important the opening minutes are in setting a tone.
"It's the same thing every game of this series," Dineen said. "The tempo always seems to be set right at the start of the game. So I would expect nothing less than that desperation mode for a team that's down by one and also wants to win the series. It's two clubs that will be colliding very early in the game."
As part of the tone-setting, you can expect the Devils to come out firing. As in literally firing a lot of shots. Remember the first period of Game 1? The Devils had 26 shots and people were making jokes after 20 minutes about the series being over in three games. That was the best a team has looked in one period this series.
Ilya Kovalchuk, who has a quiet two goals in the series, wants to see that type of play again in Game 6.
"I think all of us, we have to shoot the puck more and we have to create more traffic," Kovalchuk said. "We don't want Theodore to feel comfortable in net. You know when we have traffic in front of him, he gives up a lot of rebounds. We just have to take advantage of it."
Boding well for the Panthers? Road teams continue to have a lot of success in these playoffs. The Coyotes just knocked out what many saw as a superior team on their ice in Game 6. The parallels between the series are pretty strong. Will a Game 6 win from the "underdog" be another connection?
Your daily miscellany
- Best of Monday
- Is Jordan Staal's time in Pittsburgh reaching an end? (Toronto Sun)
- Speculation continues about the Canucks' starting goaltending and Roberto Luongo's future. Could it include a return to Florida? (Vancouver Sun)
- Get ready to play a lot of the "will he or won't he?" game with Nicklas Lidstrom and returning. Right now signs indicate he won't. (Windsor Star
- It's not often that you see fights in the postseason. Even less frequent is players pumping up the crowd mid-fight!
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