SUNRISE, Fla. — Alex Wennberg scored a goal 5:35 into overtime, and the New York Rangers regained home field advantage in the Eastern Conference finals with a 5-4 victory over the Florida Panthers in Game 3 on Sunday.
Ryan Lindgren took a shot from the left point and Wennberg – in front of the Florida net – sent it past Sergei Bobrovsky to give the Rangers a 2–1 lead in the series.
Photo by Eliot J. Schechter/NHLI via Getty Images
Igor Shesterkin made 34 stops, while Alexis Lafrenière scored two goals and Barclay Goodrow continued his surprising playoff barrage with two more scores for the Rangers.
Sam Reinhart had two power-play goals, while Aleksander Barkov and Gustav Forsling also scored for the Panthers, who will host Game 4 on Tuesday night. Bobrovsky stopped 18 shots for Florida, which is making its first back-to-back appearance in these playoffs has dropped games – both in OT.
New York led 4-2 going into the third. The Rangers were 26-0-1 this season, entering Sunday’s games where they led by two or more goals with 20 minutes left.
The Panthers were not impressed; the game was tied with 13:02 to go.
Barkov and Forsling scored less than two minutes apart in the third to erase that two-goal deficit, and Florida grabbed a break – the right break – with 7:34 to go when Barkov was originally called for a high- stick that given the Rangers a 4 minute power play. But upon review, it was determined that Mika Zibanejad was hit with his own stick and the Barkov penalty was taken off the board.
From then on, the rest of the regulation was, depending on perspective, all Panthers or all Shesterkin.
In the final 8:10 of the third round, the NHL recorded 24 shot attempts – all by Florida, while the Panthers just unleashed a barrage on Shesterkin. Of the 24 shot attempts, only six were on target and had to be saved; nine were blocked, eight missed and one hit the post.
No one found the back of the net and the teams went to overtime.
Probably long forgotten at the finish was the wild start, a complete reversal of how the first two games at Madison Square Garden went when Bobrovsky gave up two goals and Shesterkin gave up two goals — not including an own goal and an empty netter — in 134 minutes of play.
Sunday was different. After 15 minutes it was 2-2.
Reinhart opened the scoring, Lafrenière and Goodrow scored 25 seconds apart — the fifth-fastest pair of goals in Rangers playoff history — for a 2–1 New York lead. Reinhart tied the score later in the first with a goal very similar to his first, a backhander he lifted past Shesterkin from underneath.
Lafrenière and Goodrow each scored again in the second, and Florida answered in the third. But it was the Rangers who struck last, and they are now just two wins away from their first trip to the Stanley Cup Final since 2014.
