Bennett, Verhaeghe help Panthers roll past Hurricanes 5-0, take 2-0 lead in Eastern final

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The defending Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers are rolling. The Carolina Hurricanes are reeling.

Sam Bennett scored one of his two goals in Florida's three-goal first period, Sergei Bobrovsky made 17 saves and the Panthers beat the Hurricanes 5-0 on Thursday night to take a 2-0 lead in the Eastern Conference final.

Gustav Forsling and Matthew Tkachuk also scored in another tone-setting opening 20 minutes for the Panthers, while Carter Verhaeghe had three assists.

“It might have been natural for us to take a little bit to get going tonight, and it was the exact opposite,” said Tkachuk, whose putaway off the feed from Verhaeghe at the crease marked his first goal since Game 3 of the first round against Tampa Bay.

“It was an unreal start from us. The goals aside, just the way we played in the first period was as good as it gets. Yeah, that’s just a hell of a road trip.”

Florida had already ripped home-ice advantage away Tuesday night with a 5-2 win, the opener in a rematch of the 2023 conference final swept by the Panthers with four one-goal wins. Florida only tightened its grip on the series with this one, and now heads back south to host Game 3 on Saturday night.

Bennett scored a second time by skating in to clean up an attempt at the right post in the final minute of the second period to make it 4-0, ending a long shift in Carolina's end prolonged by Hurricanes defenseman Brent Burns being stuck on the ice after breaking his stick. Aleksander Barkov added a goal midway through the third as punctuation.

Bobrovsky had his third shutout of the playoffs this year and the sixth of his career, with Florida's defense smothering a Hurricanes team that typically peppers the net with shots but found little daylight.

Florida has four straight road games by a combined score of 22-4, this time sending Hurricanes fans fleeing for the exits early.

“It's fun when you're on the road and it goes quiet," Verhaeghe said. "It feels like we're doing our job.”

On the other bench, the Hurricanes found themselves on the receiving end of a crushing loss by a jarringly lopsided margin. And it marked their 14th straight loss in a conference final, going back to sweeps in 2009, 2019 and the '23 tilt with Florida.

“From my standpoint, the seat I had, Florida was on it,” Carolina coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “And you’ve got to give them credit.”

The Hurricanes managed just three first-period shots and just seven through two periods, prompting a typically rowdy home crowd to vent its frustrations with two chants of “Shoot the puck! Shoot the puck!” Carolina had a brief boost when Sebastian Aho appeared to score on a turnover in the first minute of the second period to cut the deficit to 3-1.

But Florida successfully challenged that the play was offsides. It turned out Burns' stick-check on Tkachuk near the blue line forced the puck back into the zone and right to Aho in the slot for the finish.

By the third period, Carolina had pulled veteran Frederik Andersen from net and went with backup Pyotr Kochetkov for the final period.

It wasn’t all great news for Florida. Veteran forward Sam Reinhart was knocked from the game in the first period after taking a hit from Aho in the left leg, causing Reinhart’s knee to bend awkwardly.

Coach Paul Maurice had no immediate update on Reinhart afterward.

AP NHL playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/nhl

Florida Panthers' Matthew Tkachuk (19) slips the puck past Carolina Hurricanes goaltender Frederik Andersen (31) for a goal during the first period of Game 2 of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup Eastern Conference finals in Raleigh, N.C., Thursday, May 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Karl DeBlaker)

Florida Panthers head coach Paul Maurice, back center, waits for the results of his coaches challenge during the second period of Game 2 of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup Eastern Conference finals against the Carolina Hurricanes in Raleigh, N.C., Thursday, May 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Karl DeBlaker)

Florida Panthers' Brad Marchand (63) takes the loose puck away from Carolina Hurricanes' Jack Roslovic (96) during the first period of Game 2 of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup Eastern Conference finals in Raleigh, N.C., Thursday, May 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Karl DeBlaker)

Florida Panthers' Aleksander Barkov, right, celebrates his goal with Florida Panthers' Matthew Tkachuk (19) as Carolina Hurricanes goaltender Pyotr Kochetkov (52) looks on during the third period of Game 2 of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup Eastern Conference finals in Raleigh, N.C., Thursday, May 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Karl DeBlaker)

The Florida Panthers celebrate a goal by Gustav Forsling (42) during the first period of Game 2 of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup Eastern Conference finals against the Carolina Hurricanes in Raleigh, N.C., Thursday, May 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Karl DeBlaker)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)