Darren Eliot Breaks Down the Florida Loss

Hopefully you’ve noticed that Darren Eliot and Dan Kamal have been providing some game recaps form the road lately on atlantathrashers.com. With the quick turnaround time between last night’s game and tonight’s matchup at home against the Dallas Stars I thought Darren’s take on the loss in Florida might get more attention here than on the homepage.

So here’s how Darren saw the game form upstairs:

On The Road… Sunrise, FL… 12-16-09

I don’t know what hurts more: losing when you fall out of it early, or climbing back to square an early 3-0 deficit only to give up a goal with 81 seconds remaining in regulation to render said comeback inconsequential.

The Thrashers’ 4-3 loss to the Panthers in Florida qualifies as both. The Panthers played a sound first period that resulted in a 2-0 lead courtesy of a Stephen Weiss put back of a long rebound to the right of Johan Hedberg and a nice finish by Radek Dvorak on a left-to-right cross-ice feed from Steven Reinprecht – a bid that Moose read beautifully and got most of, but the puck still found the back of the net. From there, it was all about the Panthers preserving their position with a neutral zone trap.

They continued to bottle up the Thrashers and frustrate them well into the second, extending their lead to three on a delayed penalty call that Bryan McCabe sensed and snuck down low on the weak side where Victor Oreskovich found him and fed him a tidy little offering from the left doorstep. McCabe fired in one motion, leaving Hedberg helpless. The Thrashers looked that way as the game bounced along – literally as ice conditions were less than idyllic. They couldn’t get into a flow offensively and the guys put precious few pucks at goaltender Tomas Vokoun.

Yet, with just over two minutes remaining in the second period, Toby Enstrom’s point blast struck the boot of Michael Frolik. Good hustle by Frolik and the puck even bounded to the boards… but right where Ilya Kovalchuk had gone to stand after looking frustrated the entire shift. Now, when they say pucks follow goal-scorers around, this defined that notion. Kovy’s eyes lit up as he stepped into a one-timer with precision and purpose. Suddenly where there had been very little, the Thrashers had life.

As we’ve seen so often this season, the Thrashers carried that burst into the third and dominated the proceedings. They controlled the puck and the play. Kovalchuk, in particular, had a noticeable jump to his step and he set up the second goal by skating hard into the zone, sifting right – finally eschewing the left-wing stop up move he has favored of late – and zipped a shot that Vokoun stopped, only to have Nik Antropov right there to shovel home the rebound. Suddenly, a dormant team was awake and a team in the Panthers that has yielded the most third period goals was reeling against a Thrashers squad that has netted the most final frame markers in the NHL.

Almost on cue, Slava Kozlov calmly ripped a slapper from the high slot past Vokoun to knot the game at three, after a nice wide-right drive by Max Afinogenov. Your team continued to press and impress and it looked as if two teams that had seen this before – late heroics in the previous two meetings led to Thrashers’ victories – were headed to overtime. Then the unthinkable happened. The Thrashers lost a neutral zone face-off and one by one, guys over-committed defensively. Even at that, Weiss had to pull off an amazing spinning backhand, with both Ron Hainsey and Zach Bogosian challenging between the hash marks. That move made the save more difficult for Moose, leading to a rebound that Frolik got to first and lifted to the left of a prone Hedberg.

The only thing more difficult than Weiss’s whirling windup was the final result.