"Well, definitely, the third period is an unraveling," Oilers coach Kris Knoblauch said, and he was underselling it in a nice little piece of dry coachspeak. Edmonton seized the opportunity of getting blown out to take out all their collected frustrations toward the Panthers, and they had plenty of those. That's sort of what the Panthers do. They make you very, very mad, and then you blow up, and then they mock you, because they're winning 6-1 and have a 2-1 lead in the Stanley Cup Final. Because Florida's means, mean as they are, have an end beyond agitation for its own sake. They want you to play their game. And they're better at it than you are.
This was the quintessential Florida Panthers playoff game. A true ass-kicking from 56 seconds on, when Brad Marchand punched home a loose puck after an offensive-zone faceoff. Panthers physicality led directly to Panthers goals, with no better illustration than Sam Bennett basically body-checking himself to a breakaway the other way, and the fourth Florida goal that gave this one official rout status.
"We never got to our game," said Connor McDavid, who was emphatically not allowed to show up Aaron Ekblad for the second game in a row. Edmonton took the bait all night, and look nothing so much as flustered in the cold light of day. A.J. Greer stole Jake Walman's glove and tossed it onto the bench, which led to Walman ineffectually spraying water toward the Panthers bench, mostly dousing the TNT crew between the benches. Corey Perry dropped his gloves and Niko Mikkola just laughed in his face. If you didn't know the score, you could've divined it from which team was treating its violence with puckish joy and which one was genuinely fuming.
After a fifth Panthers goal chased Stuart Skinner from the game, things broke down completely, going from targeted mischief to a full-on line brawl after Trent Frederic broke his stick across Sam Bennett's back.
By the time the buzzer sounded and the 6-1 score was in the books, Edmonton had committed 21 penalties for 85 penalty minutes. It's tempting to chalk this up to the usual third-period-of-a-blowout shenanigans, and certainly, all the Oilers treated it like no big deal and were eager to move on, mentally and literally, to Thursday's Game 4. But the Panthers tend to have this effect on opponents—that'll happen on a roster where Brad Marchand is only, like, the fifth- or sixth-most annoying guy—and frustrations usually only ever build. They're not a team that allows you to let off steam, because they know when to fight back and when to treat it like a joke. “We talked about it in the third,” Matthew Tkachuk said. “If you have to take a punch, take a punch. If you have to take a cross-check, take a cross-check. Spear, slash in the face, whatever the case is, you’ve got to take it. We just played a really smart game.”
The Oilers are veterans and should be able to reset, but the season is getting late. Edmonton's lost two in a row for the first time since their first two games of the first round, and fairly desperately need to even the series back up to retake home-ice advantage. That won't be easy to do against a Florida team that seems to have an extra gear, and the ability to shift into it almost at will. This Final was supposed to be won or lost on razor-thin margins. The Panthers prefer a laugher.
