At 38, six-time All-Star forward Eric Staal seizes the moment for the Florida Panthers
The Staal brothers — well, half of them — came to Broward County in the offseason largely because Paul Maurice, who had just been hired as the Florida Panthers’ new coach, trusted them. Both Eric and Marc Staal played for him when he was coaching the Carolina Hurricanes, and he and the organization thought their experience could be an asset to the still-young Panthers.
They were supposed to be glue guys and locker room leaders — more reliable than remarkable. They’re the two oldest players on the team, each one at least 18 months older than anyone else on the active roster, and needed to be stewards for Maurice as he tried to implement a new system in Florida. A game like the one they put together Monday to help the Panthers beat the Anaheim Ducks, 4-3, in overtime was never guaranteed, but it came at just the moment Florida needed it most.
“We all know what they can bring to this group,” forward Carter Verhaeghe said Monday. “We have them here for a reason.”
Panthers avert disaster, rally to beat league-worst Ducks in OT to regain playoff spot
With the Panthers down 2-0 to the worst team in the NHL, the Staals each scored in the second period to tie the game and ultimately help Florida pull out a come-from-behind win — only its eighth of the year — at FLA Live Arena in Sunrise.
With 17:48 left in the second period, Eric Staal finally got the Panthers on the board. Defenseman Radko Gudas — incidentally, the only other active skater older than 30 — fired a shot through traffic from above the right faceoff circle and Staal got just enough of the puck to tap it past Ducks goaltender John Gibson. The six-time All-Star pumped his right fist and yelled to celebrate the rally-starting goal and then he nearly cashed in on a few more chances as the period went along.
Staal, 38, finished with four shots and three scoring chances, and played 15:30. The forward now has 11 goals this season after not appearing in a single NHL game last season and only making it back to the league after spending the preseason on a professional tryout.
“He is peaking,” Maurice said Monday.
The game-tying goal, with 2:37 left in the second, was even more unlikely. Marc Staal, 36, only scored his first goal of the season Thursday, on a long slap shot through traffic against the Washington Capitals. For his second, the defenseman wound up running a 2-on-1 break with Mathew Tkachuk and finished off a pass from the All-Star right wing to knot the score at 2-2.
While most of their teammates faltered, Florida’s two most seasoned veterans both understood the moment and delivered on it.
“We need the points and I’ve been around long enough to know you can’t wait,” Eric Staal said Monday. “We needed to make sure we were engaged and ready, and sometimes you’ve got to drag everybody into it a little bit and that’s with hard-nosed play and I thought our line did that for the whole game.”
Staal’s line — featuring wingers Ryan Lomberg and Nick Cousins — truly was the anchor of the victory. When Staal’s line was on the ice, the Panthers (29-25-6) outshot Anaheim, 17-2, and Lomberg scored another game-tying goal in the third period to force overtime.
Staal’s line has produced at least an even shot differential in four of the last five games.
“He’s built that line with Lomberg and Cousins,” Maurice said. “They were our best line tonight and they have been in all of our heavy-fatigue games.”
Staal understands how important this is.
This run, Maurice said, started Feb. 13, when Florida needed more than 28 minutes from All-Star center Aleksander Barkov to gut out a shootout win against the Minnesota Wild.
Since then, Barkov, who averages more than 21 minutes per game, hasn’t hit 20 minutes in a regulation game. The Panthers had to manage an every-other-day schedule with four road games and Staal got the call for a heavy workload at the end of another grueling week.
Staal, despite a borderline Hockey Hall of Fame resume, is no longer able to be one of the best players on the ice on any given night. Almost 40, he’s now best suited to make a handful of heady plays in limited time on ice, picking his spots — most frequently on the penalty kill this year — to deliver meaningful moments.
There’s still a 1,000-point scorer inside there, though, and Staal on Monday used his feel for the moment to summon it at a moment Florida badly needed it.
“He loves to play and he understands. As a player gets older, they value the push more and more, the big games more and more,” Maurice said. “They can mentally drive harder. Sometimes a 22-year-old thinks he’s playing the next 16 years, he has lots of big games, but the older players value these. They wind themselves up better.”
