Would Maurice have challenged the goal if he were in Knoblauch’s situation?

“Based on what I see at my feet and what my video person looks at, there was no way I would have challenged that if it was reversed,” Maurice said. “There was no way I thought you can conclusively say that was offside. I don’t know what the Oilers get. I don’t know what the league gets. I just know that, if I would have had to challenge that based on what I saw, I would not have challenged. I’m not saying it’s not offside. We’ll get still frames. We’ll bring in the CIA. We’ll figure it out, but in the 30 seconds that I would’ve made that call, I would not have challenged.”

It was a gut punch for a Panthers team that has been lifeless more often than not since going up 3-0 in the best-of-7 series. Florida has now been outscored 18-5 over the past three losses.

They were down 2-0 46 seconds into the second period on goals from Warren Foegele and Adam Henrique and were being outshot 12-2 when Barkov appeared to have put them on the board and give them some momentum.

Until he didn’t.

Edmonton ultimately went up 3-0 by the end of the second period before Barkov scored — for real this time — 1:28 into the third period.

“You’re looking for a jumpstart,” Maurice said. “The shots are 11-2 in the first period so we need something to go. I think they ended up 11-4 [shots in favor of Florida] in the second period and they scored on two of them. It would have been a spark for us for sure. His next goal was. I thought we had a little bit of juice there after that, but it was it was unfortunate it was called.”

As for how the players viewed it. Both Verhaeghe and Barkov said they did not know the play was offside in real time.

“It sucks that it didn’t go our way,” Verhaeghe said, “but that’s above my head. I’m sure it’s the right call if they’re watching a million replays.”

Barkov added: “It was offside, so it doesn’t count. We had our chances after that. We had our chances to get to one goal, but then they got to three-nothing.”

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