Tampa Bay Lightning forward Brandon Hagel left his team’s 4-2 loss to the Florida Panthers in Game 4 of their Eastern Conference first-round series on Monday night after a high hit from defenseman Aaron Ekblad that wasn’t penalized.
The Panthers took a 3-1 series lead in the “Battle of Florida,” fueled by three straight goals in the final four minutes of the third period.
With less than nine minutes left in the second period, Hagel played the puck out of the Tampa Bay zone near the boards. Ekblad skated in on him and delivered a hit with his right forearm that made contact with Hagel’s head, shoving him down in the process.
The back of Hagel’s head bounced off the ice, and he was pulled from the game because of concussions concerns. Hagel missed the rest of the game.
“It’s getting tiresome answering questions about a hit every single game,” Lightning coach Jon Cooper said after the game before asking media members if they had anything to say about Ekblad’s check, with no takers.
“All right, let’s move on,” he said.
Game 4 saw Hagel return to the Tampa Bay lineup after he served a one-game suspension for interference on Florida captain Aleksander Barkov in Game 2. The NHL ruled that Barkov wasn’t eligible to be hit and that Hagel made head contact with him, forcing him from the game with an injury.
Barkov returned for Game 3, a 5-1 Lightning win. It was the first suspension of Hagel’s career.
After Game 4, Panthers coach Paul Maurice opted not to opine on Ekblad’s hit or any possible repercussions from the NHL Department of Player Safety.
“I want to be consistent with what I said on the Hagel [hit]. I saw it. I’ve seen it before. I’ll coach, the players will play, the refs will make the calls, and the league will do what they will with it,” Maurice said. “I don’t want to use this platform to start making my case on this. Everybody’s got a job to do. I’ll stay in my lane.”
Earlier in the series, Cooper and Maurice traded words over illegal hits. After Hagel’s hit on Barkov, Maurice said, “The only players we hit are the ones that have pucks.” Cooper quoted that verbatim following Florida forward Matthew Tkachuk’s major penalty against Tampa Bay winger Jake Guentzel near the end of Game 3, which didn’t rise to the level of supplemental discipline.
Hagel was one of the best two-way wingers in the league this season, with 35 goals and 55 assists in 82 games for the Lightning.
The Lightning trailed the Panthers 1-0 at the time of the hit by Ekblad, but Mitchell Chaffee and Erik Cernak scored two goals in 11 seconds after Hagel left the game to give Tampa Bay a 2-1 lead. When the teams returned for the third period, Hagel was not on the bench. The Panthers rallied in the third, as Ekblad and Seth Jones also scored 11 seconds apart, the fastest two goals in Florida postseason history.
“It’s great to have him back. On the ice, he’s a leader. He shows up big in big games,” Jones said of Ekblad, who missed the first two games of the playoffs after he was suspended 20 games without pay in March for violating the NHL and NHL Players’ Association’s policy on performance-enhancing drugs.
Ekblad had an earlier goal negated by an offside challenge.
When Carter Verhaeghe added an empty-netter to clinch the comeback win, it completed the second-fastest three goals in Panthers’ postseason history (2:07). Their fastest was 1:17 in the first postseason game in franchise history against Boston in 1996.
“Both teams in the game had two spurts of 11 seconds that were really rewarding. Unfortunately, theirs came at the end,” Cooper said. “For 115 minutes, we passed every test possible. We played well enough to win both games [in Sunrise]. We came up a little short.”
Game 5 is in Tampa on Wednesday.