For now, The Save has kept the game tied. By the end of the evening, it had saved the game as Florida won in overtime.
And according to Panthers coach Paul Maurice, the impact of Sergei Bobrovsky’s moment on Tuesday night will only continues – with a step beyond these NHL playoffs and the series between Florida and the Tampa Bay Lightning.
He won one game. It can also boost the game.
Maurice said: “There will be a number of kids in the driveway this weekend and they all want to play golf for the first time.” “For me, that’s the way it is. They see something magical and have to try it, right? You have five kids and there’s going to be a street hockey game somewhere, everyone’s going to want to be Bobrovsky, they’re going to be spinning around the net, trying to make spin-o- saves. rama. br>Memo to these kids: Good luck.
The hype continued Wednesday: Bobbery, some called him, a play on the surnames Bobrovsky and obvious nickname: Bob. Others say except for the playoffs. Backup of the year, backup of all time, you get the idea. It was so good that even the Lightning flipped their collective hats out of respect.
“A great save,” Lightning captain Steven Stamkos said.re have been approximately 4 million saves in NHL history, and Bobrovsky was responsible for 20,681 of them. Of course, there’s no exact ranking for all of them, but for now anyway, the question “how did he do it?” » by Bobrovsky. the play was alone.
“I thought this was the best save I’ve ever seen in my life,” Florida’s Vladimir Tarasenko said Wednesday. “How wonderful. I don’t know what to say.”
Even retired soccer star JJ Watt noticed: “What a save,” he wrote on social media.
Bobrovsky made the save like this: he faced left, looking at Stamkos, whose ball was relatively close to the net. Stamkos saw tons of ice from the other side of the slot and put the puck in the gap. , where Lightning defenseman Matt Dumba shot left from about 10 feet into the wide net.
Keywords: Was Bobrovsky – out of “desperation,” he would later say – dove back goal, blindly extended his left wrist and somehow gloved Dumba’s shot to keep the game tied at 2-2. This saved the game; The Panthers scored Carter Verhaeghe’s goal at 2:59 of overtime to win 3-2.
“It was a lifetime of hard work, the ability to know the “If you’re in a place where mentally you’re not going to be able to give up on this play, because you’re going to think you still have a chance to stop that puck,” Maurice said.
Panthers forward Anton Lundell put it much more succinctly: “Pretty sick,” he said.
It was “sick” in the true sense of the word often, especially since their goaltender, Andrei Vasilevskiy, was also a brick wall all night. Vasilevskiy didn’t make the high-flying save that Bobrovsky did, but he stymied Florida’s offense in the process. throughout the second and third periods to give the Lightning a chance.
Florida leads the series 2-0; Game 3 will be in Tampa on Thursday.
“It was one incredible scoring drive. I think that was the highlight of the entire series, front to back,” Lightning’s Brandon Hagel said Wednesday. “Obviously we have Vasi; as they say, the best goalkeeper in the league, and they have a very good goalkeeper there. It will be difficult to get the balls back from him and it will also be difficult to get the balls back from our goalkeeper. Hopefully we can try to surpass them by more than one person. »
Rarely do teams congratulate the other team during a series; it is usually reserved after the ceremony is over and the traditional handshakes have taken place. But the Lightning praised Bobrovsky after what he did Tuesday and the Panthers in turn praised Vasilevskiy.
“Both goalies played very well in this game,” Maurice said. “And the saves that don’t seem like many can be the best saves, considering the amount of work you have to do to get the strategy right when you get there. Some special stops.