Hurricanes rally but come up short

SUNRISE, Fla. -- It was a better effort, but the Carolina Hurricanes still fell short.

The last-place Florida Panthers got the last word and held on for a 3-2 victory before 11,117 at the BankAtlantic Center on Monday night.

The Canes were trying to rebound from Sunday’s 5-2 loss to the Nashville Predators but found themselves down by two goals even after they started the game strong.

“I thought that in the first period, Florida came out and played a really, really strong period,” Carolina coach Peter Laviolette said. “I thought we came out and matched it at the beginning. When they scored the second goal, we lost our steam a little bit.”

Carolina goalie Michael Leighton had a nice glove save of a shot by Bille Peltonen, the Panthers’ first of the game, but a few moments later Florida’s Nathan Horton, moving toward the right wing, handed the puck back to David Booth, who immediately fired for the first goal at the 7:04 mark.

The Panthers had an intense attack again more than seven minutes later, and after shots from Noah Welch and Radek Dvorak, Peltonen wristed in the puck, which had trickled out in front of the net, to give the Panthers a 2-0 lead at the 15:45 mark.

At the intermission, the team dug deep.

“We just had to get back to what we were doing,” Laviolette said. “The first part of that period was good hockey.”

Said center Chad LaRose: “We knew that we didn’t have a very good first, and we knew we had to come out strong and start throwing more pucks at the net.”

The Canes quickly dug themselves out of a two-goal deficit.

Tuomo Ruutu, in front of the net, found Sergei Samsonov’s shot banking off goalie Tomas Vakoun less than a half a minute into the second period.

Less than two minutes later, Samsonov fired again, with both Eric Staal and LaRose in front of the net. Staal took the first shot from the goalie’s right, and when the puck trickled loose, LaRose put it past Vakoun.

“We had a good working shift there, my linemates,” LaRose said. “That kept it deep. ... I saw [Samsonov’s] shot. Me and Staal were wacking at it, and it ended up just right there for me to bang in. Nothing special.”

The Canes weren’t able to make anything of the only power play of the first two periods, when Richard Zednick got two minutes in the box for holding the stick.

And the Panthers took the lead back late in the second period, when Peltonen appeared to score his second goal, though Gregory Campbell was given credit after the game had ended.

Late in an attack, Peltonen skated out in front of the net from the right corner and fired over Leighton’s right shoulder, though the puck apparently touched Campbell’s leg on the way in. It gave the Panthers a 3-2 lead at 17:42.

“It was a good period,” LaRose said of the second period. “We tried to duplicate it in the third, and if we did, we would have won the game. ... We can’t keep coming from behind. It’s a tough loss.”

The Canes actually outshot their opponents 29-22.

Carolina team captain Rod Brind’Amour lamented the team’s luck.

“It was a much better effort,” Brind’Amour said. “We didn’t give up as much. But the goals we gave up were not good decisions by us. Right now it’s a fine line. We’re not getting much chances so we can’t give up any.”