The Islanders defeated the 2-1.
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Tavares also scored a goal with 53.2 seconds in regulation left to force overtime, while Thomas Greiss again played well with 41 saves.
The New York Islanders are headed to the second round for the first time in 23 years, and it’s hard to argue that they were the better team in their first-round series. In double overtime, he scored to win the game and the series.
Greiss went to the bench with just under two minutes to play in the third for a sixth skater and the Panthers missed a golden chance on the empty net, with Vincent Trocheck shoving one wide of the goal. Tavares skated in and fired an initial shot that Roberto Luongo saved, but the NY captain got the rebound and scored to end the longest home game in Islanders history. It was Huberdeau’s first goal of the series and marked the fifth time Florida scored first. They no longer have to hear how long it’s been since the Islanders last won a series.
John Tavares scored the winning goal last night in double O.T.as the New York Islanders take the series 4-2 over the Florida Panthers. “It’s time we had to get over this hump and push forward”.
After a scoreless first overtime, Tavares sped into the zone with just over 9 minutes left in the 2nd overtime, launching a shot on goal that was deflected, but he managed to get the puck behind the net and came out the other side tapping the puck into the net and setting of nothing short of chaos. He reflected on the tough times of not making the playoffs, to the devastation he and his teammates felt when they lost Game 7 in the Eastern Conference First Round against the Washington Capitals a year ago. And even all those stops on the Long Island Railroad from Manhattan, they somehow still existed in the shadow of the Rangers, even when they were winning four Stanley Cups in a row in the early 1980s.
Luongo made 49 saves for the Panthers, who now inherit the Islanders’ mantle as the longest-suffering team in the National Hockey League. “Luongo got a glove on Quine”s wrister to keep it 1-1 and send it to a second overtime for the second straight game.
3 – The arrival of playoff John Tavares: Tavares is the hardest-working Islander on the team, on and off the ice.
Nikolay Kulemin slid a s that Luongo stopped, but he didn’t know that the puck had squirted free, and it sat in the crease. But the puck trickled out from underneath him to his right, and Tavares swooped in to bury it.
“I think it gives a group confidence”, said Jack Capuano, the Islanders’ coach since November 2010. “Lucky enough, it just squirted under Luongo and it doesn’t get any easier than that”. The goal is to win the Stanley Cup. I’ve been with so many guys here for so many years, it means a lot when you’ve gone through some lows, and then you finally start feeling that you have a team and you can put it together like this. That being said, the Islanders were coming off three Cups and certainly couldn’t be underestimated.
The Florida Panthers were less than a minute away from bringing the best-of-seven series back to Sunrise for a seventh game. He allowed four goals over the last three games of the series and believe it, the Panthers had many glorious looks.
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0 – Prior playoff victories for Isles netminder Thomas Greiss, before he won four in round one. “He comes up big when he has to”, Panthers head coach Gerard Gallant said. “Basically that’s probably the main reason why we’re moving on”. You saw the passes, you saw the execution in our game.
