#Islanders finish off Panthers to earn Stanley Cup playoffs berth

Islanders coach Barry Trotz wanted his team to find their killer instinct for Game 4, and boy, were they lethal.

With a 5-1 win Friday afternoon, the Islanders knocked the Panthers out of the best-of-five qualifying round and punched their ticket to the first round of the 16-team Stanley Cup playoffs. The win allowed the Islanders to secure their second straight appearance in the first round.

Left winger Anthony Beauvillier single-handedly jump-started the Islanders with two goals, three minutes and 38 seconds apart, in the first period to create a margin the Panthers chased for a majority of the game.

A back-breaking goal from Mathew Barzal, his first of the series, at 10:34 of the third officially put the game out of reach as the Islanders evicted the Panthers from the bubble.

JG Pageau registered his third goal of the series with an empty-netter and goalie Semyon Varlamov turned aside 24 of the 25 shots he faced.

Trotz inserted Leo Komarov into the lineup in place of Tom Kuhnhackl to bolster the Islanders’ penalty kill, which proved effective as they killed off three of the Panthers’ four man-advantage opportunities.

The Islanders came out with a shot-first mentality and immediately tested Panthers goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky. Halfway through the first, the Islanders had laid 11 hits compared to Florida’s four and Beauvillier was heating up as he took a deflection off the boards and sent a hard shot that Bobrovsky swallowed.

Beauvillier then sent a surprise backhanded shot that flipped right through Bobrovsky’s pads to put the Islanders up 1-0 at 11:32. Varlamov came up with a big save on Aleksander Barkov on the other end in the next shift.

After catching Florida on a bad change, Barzal sent a crisp pass on the odd-man rush for Beauvillier to slam home for the 2-0 score at 15:10. Barzal was stifled with three minutes left in the first, splitting defenders in the Panthers zone and getting a shot off that Bobrovsky had to deflect away. It capped the 23-year-old’s best period of the series.

The Islanders’ momentum slipped away just as quickly as it came after Jordan Eberle was called for hooking Keith Yandle at 18:29. Twelve seconds into the man-advantage, Mike Hoffman capitalized to make it a one-goal game.

Bobrovsky kept the Panthers in it early in the second after a long shot from Ryan Pulock put the puck right in front of the netminder, who made back-to-back highlight-reel saves on rebound put-in attempts from Anders Lee and Barzal.

The Panthers were then called for too-many-men on the ice and tik-tak-toe passing from the Islanders resulted in Brock Nelson putting it away from the right circle to make it 3-1 at 8:01 of the middle frame.

The Islanders buckled down in the third until Barzal’s goal off the rush gave them a 4-1 advantage. Pageau chipped in an empty netter at 17:17 after the Panthers pulled Bobrovsky for a sixth skater with four minutes left in regulation.