SUNRISE, Fla. — Brad Marchand scored on a deflected shot at 15:27 of overtime and the Florida Panthers beat the Toronto Maple Leafs 5-4 in Game 3 on Friday night to cut their deficit in the Eastern Conference semifinal series to 2-1.
Aleksander Barkov, Sam Reinhart, Carter Verhaeghe and Jonah Gadjovich scored for Florida, which got 27 saves from Sergei Bobrovsky. Evan Rodrigues had two assists for the Panthers. They are 13-2 in their past 15 playoff overtime games.
John Tavares scored twice, and Matthew Knies and Morgan Rielly also scored for the Maple Leafs. Joseph Woll stopped 32 shots.
Game 4 will be in Sunrise on Sunday night.
Florida erased deficits of 2-0 and 3-1, and that has been almost impossible to do against Toronto this season.
By the numbers, it was all looking good for the Maple Leafs.
They were 30-3-0 when leading after the first period, including the playoffs, the second-best record in the league.
They were 38-8-2, the league's third-best record when scoring first.
They had blown only 11 leads all season, none in the playoffs.
They were 44-3-1 in games where they led by two goals or more.
Combine that with Toronto having won all 11 of its previous best-of-seven series when taking a 2-0 lead at home, Florida being 0-5 in series where it dropped Games 1 and 2, and leaguewide, teams facing 2-0 deficits come back to win those series only about 14% of the time.
But Marchand — a longtime Toronto playoff nemesis from his days in Boston — got the biggest goal of Florida's season, rendering all those numbers moot for now.
The Leafs got two goals that deflected in off Panthers defensemen: Tavares' second goal nicked the glove of Gustav Forsling on its way past Bobrovsky for a 3-1 lead, and Rielly's goal redirected
Read more on espn.com
espn.com
