SUNRISE, Fla. — Sam Reinhart scored a power-play goal 1:12 into overtime, and the Florida Panthers beat the New York Rangers 3-2 to tie the Eastern Conference finals at two games apiece.
It was the third consecutive overtime game in the series, and the first time Florida had a victory in those matchups.
Blake Wheeler, playing his first game with the Rangers since mid-February, was penalized for hogging Aleksander Barkov 59 seconds into the extra session. And it didn't take long for the Panthers to capitalize, with Barkov moving Reinhart up front.
Sam Bennett and Carter Verhaeghe also scored for Florida, which got 21 saves (and an assist) from Sergei Bobrovsky.
Vincent Trocheck and Alexis Lafrenière scored for the Rangers and Igor Shesterkin stopped 37 shots.
Game 5 is Thursday in New York, where the teams split the first two matchups of this series. Game 6 will be on Saturday at Sunrise, and the Prince of Wales Trophy, awarded to the Eastern champions, will be on display that night.
Bennett put Florida on the board midway through the second period on a second try. His first shot beat Shesterkin, but he didn't go into the net, and Bennett, who followed the shot, managed to get to the puck before anyone else. He threw it off the back of the goalie's skate and it barely crossed the goal line.
And 3 1/2 minutes later, Florida had the lead on a Verhaeghe pinball goal.
Matthew Tkachuk centered the puck from the right corner and it deflected off Rangers defenseman Ryan Lindgren's stick. In the air, he bounced off Shesterkin, then off Lindgren's upper body, and Verhaeghe, with more baseball swing than anything else, hit it in the air for a 2-1 Florida lead.
Including the playoffs, over the past two seasons, Florida entered Tuesday with an NHL-best 81-2-6 record in games in which it led after 40 minutes.
Lafrenière didn't care. A neat spin move by Adam Fox gave him the puck on the left side of the box and he scored it with 16:32 left for his third goal in the last two games.
The rest of the regulation was crazy. Back and forth, the game feels more like a 3-on-3 regular-season overtime than anything else, going from one extreme to the other: Bobrovsky making some point-blank stops, Shesterkin once again getting gunned down just as he arrived late to Game 3 without result. Florida available.
And for the third game in a row, they went to overtime.
Trocheck opened the scoring with a power-play count, on a play in which he won a faceoff, moved to the high slot, waited for a centering pass from Artemi Panarin and fired a perfect shot, an inch or two beyond the right side of Bobrovsky's head, kissing it from the bottom of the crossbar towards the goal.
Then, the crossbar gives way to the Rangers' power play. He missed the next one, when the inch game went in favor of the Panthers.
New York staggered Florida later in the first period when Brandon Montour was in the box to cross-check. Mika Zibanejad was alone on the left side of the box and shot into a ton of an open net, but the puck hit Bobrovsky's shoulder, bounced off the crossbar, and this time, bounced into the box, just off the goal line. the Panthers remained down only 1-0.
