"We just let up; I don't know what it was," defenseman Keith Ballard said. "It seems we've fought for everything we've had lately. We haven't had a real comfortable lead like that, and we didn't handle it well."

"I'm excited to play," said [Nathan Horton], who has missed the past eight games because of cut on his ankle. "It's kind of a different Panthers team than the past. It's really changed in a matter of a month. Things are going good now, and everybody's really buying into what Pete has been telling us all year."

"That's the environment that we want to have here, that there's pressure to perform every night and that you've got people pushing for your job every night at all positions," he said.