The Panthers had some big highlights in Sunday’s game that were obscured by tough loss

Tampa Bay’s 5-4 win against the Florida Panthers in Game 1 of their first-round NHL playoff series Sunday night obscured some highlights from the losing squad.

Jonathan Huberdeau led the Panthers with a team-high three points, and one of his two assists came on a brilliant spin-move pass that ended up on Owen Tippett’s stick.

Tippett, Florida’s first-round pick and the 10th overall selection in the 2017 NHL Draft, scored the first playoff goal of his young career, shooting on a wide-open left side of the net.

“He didn’t play a lot,” Panthers coach Joel Quenneville said of Tippett, who got 9:10 of ice time, mostly with Huberdeau and Sam Bennett. “But he looked like he belonged with those guys.”

Added Tippett: “First postseason goal — it felt good. [Huberdeau] made a great pass.”

Beyond Tippett and Huberdeau, the Panthers also got goals from Aleksander Barkov and Carter Verhaeghe. Bennett and Keith Yandle each had two assists.

Here are some other Panthers stats:

▪ Defenseman Radko Gudas had a game-high 11 hits in less than 20 minutes. No other player on either side had more than six hits.

▪ Defenseman Brandon Montour was active in 20:31 of ice time. He had a game-high six shots on goal, and he tied Bennett with a team-high three blocks.

▪ Tippett was a team-high plus-two.

▪ Surprisingly, defenseman Markus Nutivaara played a team-high 22:13. It was his 13th career playoff game but his. first with the Panthers.

▪ The Panthers penalty-kill unit, which got burned for three Lightning goals, was mostly comprised of forwards Alex Wennberg and Noel Acciari and defensemen Gustav Forsling and MacKenzie Weegar.

“Five on five, we played well,” Barkov said of Florida’s 3-1 advantage when the teams were playing with the same amount of skaters. “We’ll go to work on some spots of our game.

“[The loss], I know it sucks, but, whatever, it happened. Now we’ve got to concentrate on the next game.”

THIS AND THAT

▪ Lightning coach Jon Cooper on the crowd of 9,646, the most allowed in the BB&T Center this year in the era of COVID restrictions: “Thousands and thousands in attendance — it was awesome.”

▪ Barkov on the crowd, which sounded more like 20,000 due to their enthusiasm: “I got goosebumps during the national anthem. It was so nice. You want this to happen every game.”

▪ Bennett was suspended for Tuesday’s Game 2 for boarding the Lightning’s Blake Coleman.