Miami (AFP) – Edmonton’s Leon Draisaitl scored his second overtime winner of this Stanley Cup Final as the Oilers beat the Florida Panthers 5-4 to level the NHL championship series at two games apiece on Thursday. The 29-year-old German center scored his fourth overtime goal of the playoffs at 11:18 of the extra session to decide a roller coaster of a contest that saw the Panthers take a 3-0 lead in the first period.
The Oilers answered with three goals in the second period, and Jake Walman gave Edmonton their first lead of the game when he hammered a shot to Florida goalie Sergei Bobrovsky’s glove side to make it 4-3 at 13:36 of the third. There were just 19.5 seconds left in regulation when Florida’s Sam Reinhart tied it up to force the 100th Stanley Cup Final overtime game in history. The Oilers are trying to become the first Canadian club since the Montreal Canadiens in 1993 to capture the trophy.
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The best-of-seven series returns on Saturday to Edmonton, where the teams split two overtime thrillers before the Panthers’ blowout victory in game three in Sunrise, Florida. On Thursday, the hosts looked in full control after a dominant first period. Matthew Tkachuk scored a pair of power-play goals—the first in a five-on-three—and Anton Lundell buried a pass from Carter Verhaeghe to make it 3-0 in the final minute of the first.
Edmonton moved to shake things up by pulling goalie Stuart Skinner to start the second, with Calvin Pickard taking over for a second straight game. Pickard stopped all 10 shots he faced in the second as Edmonton clawed back to tie it. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins scored on a power play 3:33 into the second, lofting a crisp shot past Bobrovsky. Darnell Nurse made it a one-goal game, and Vasily Podkolzin seized a Nurse rebound and fired into the net to tie it at 15:05 of the second.
“Sometimes I think we’d like to put ourselves into better situations for ourselves, so we don’t constantly have to fight back and hang in there and scratch and claw our way back,” said Draisaitl, whose four overtime goals this post-season is an NHL playoff record. “But it is a great characteristic of our team—we continue to chip away at it.”
“I think it’s just the trust that we have that once we find our legs and once we find our game, that we know how good we can be and we just continue to push through whatever adversity is coming,” Draisaitl added. The Oilers fell to the Panthers in seven games in last year’s Stanley Cup Final.
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