TORONTO — Jordan Eberle scored twice, including the go-ahead goal, and the New York Islanders rallied to a 4-2 win over the Florida Panthers to take a 2-0 lead in their best-of-five NHL preliminary-round playoff series on Tuesday.
Ryan Pulock and Matt Martin also scored, and Semyon Varlamov stopped 26 shots in a game New York overcame a pair of one-goal deficits.
Mike Hoffman had a goal and assist, and captain Aleksander Barkov also scored for Florida, which is one loss from going one-and-done in the playoffs for a fifth consecutive time.
The Panthers have advanced past the playoffs’ opening round just once in franchise history, in 1996, when Florida reached the Stanley Cup Final before being swept by Colorado.
Florida is making its first playoff appearance since 2016, when the Panthers were eliminated by the Islanders in six games.
Florida finished 10th in the East and qualified for the playoffs, which were expanded to include 12 teams from each conference after the coronavirus pandemic cut short the regular season in mid-March.
Sergei Bobrovsky stopped 30 shots and had little chance on Eberle’s go-ahead goal with 3:33 left in the second period.
Set up in the left circle, Eberle patiently waited for defenseman Brady Keeper to go down and attempt to block the shot. Eberle took a step into the middle to avoid Keeper and caught Bobrovsky leaning before snapping a shot into the open left side.
Pulock, who also assisted on Eberle’s first goal, tied the score at 2 with a power-play goal with 6:12 remaining in the second. Pulock blasted a shot from the top of the left circle, which somehow sneaked in under Bobrovsky’s left pad.
The Islanders avoided a major scare 8 1/2 minutes into the third period, when leading scorer Mathew Barzal crashed heavily and awkwardly into the end boards after getting a shot off and being shoved from behind by Florida’s Frank Vatrano. Barzal got up slowly, and after being attended to by a trainer, he returned for the next shift.
Eberle sealed the victory with New York’s second power-play goal of the game with 9:31 left, when Anthony Beauvillier’s shot from the left circle banked in off Eberle’s shin.
