Fans in Sunrise, Florida, may want to bring spare caps to the arena. For the second game in a row, Brady Tkachuk scored all three of his side’s goals, and this time he did it with the Florida Panthers staring at defeat.
For two periods on Thursday the Vancouver Canucks looked like the better side, or at least the more efficient one. Liam Ohgren beat Akira Schmid with Vancouver’s very first shot, and defenceman Elias Pettersson added a second goal late in the opening period after a pass from Filip Chytil, who was playing his first game of the season. Goalkeeper Leevi Merilainen then stopped wave after wave of Florida attacks.
Only on their 32nd shot did the Panthers break through, when Ekblad set up Tkachuk for a long-range wrist shot with under nine minutes to play. With the goalie pulled, he struck again from a Carter Verhaeghe feed, and the puck clanked in off the far post as the clock showed 0:13. In overtime he needed just 2:23 to settle it with a wrist shot, making it 3-2.
Florida acquired the 27-year-old from Ottawa over the summer, and his new club had to wait: six games passed without a single goal. On Tuesday in Columbus the drought ended in style, with three goals and an assist as Florida won 7-3. No Panther before him had ever strung together two natural hat tricks and only the second, after Aleksander Barkov, to complete one in overtime.
“Today was pretty special,” Tkachuk said, while defenceman Seth Jones praised him as “a true gamer.” The win lifts Florida to 4-2-2, while the slumping Canucks fell to 2-6-1 with a sixth defeat on the trot.
