Tag: nhl stanley cup playoffs

Raleigh

Polish it up, put a pretty face on it, cook the stats, cherry-pick the highlights. It’s what you do after you lose a playoff game by one goal for the eighth straight time, after losing a fifth straight in overtime, after your season is pushed to the brink of extinction.

Because somehow you have to find an excuse to get up in the morning, get to the rink, rally some emotion and try again.

The reality is, it almost certainly doesn’t matter. Thursday night was the Carolina Hurricanes’ best and perhaps last chance to get back in this series, and it ended the same way all of their playoff losses seem to end.

Even if they can postpone the handshakes by winning on Saturday, the Hurricanes are fighting against the same long odds as all but the four teams that somehow navigated their way out of this predicament.

By the time Artemi Panarin tipped the puck past Pyotr Kochetkov 102 seconds into overtime Thursday to give the New York Rangers a 3-2 win and put them up 3-0 in the series, the bell was already tolling for the Hurricanes.

They can thank their power play for that, 0-for-5 again, now 0-15 in the series, with the added bonus of giving up a backbreaking short-handed goal Thursday. The Hurricanes are minus-5 in special teams in the series after losing three one-goal games. That’s it. That’s all.

Slice it as thin as you want, it all comes back to that. The NHL’s second-best power play in the regular season is cutting the Hurricanes’ postseason abruptly short.

“Obviously, three games in a row, same story,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “I hate it for the guys, because I think we’re playing really well. You take that part of it out of it, they’ve done everything we’ve asked the guys to do.”

Kotchetkov saved the Hurricanes’ season in December and he nearly did it again Thursday, stopping or steering wide multiple breakaways and even showing the composure he lacked earlier in his career when two different melees erupted during a surly first period and he turned and skated to the corner instead of engaging.

Andrei Svechnikov was a force again, throwing his body around and dominating play, but he didn’t get the goal he deserved until it was almost too late, the score-tying goal with 96 seconds to go and Kochetkov on the bench.

The guy who didn’t play in the playoffs last year and the guy they got at the deadline both scored — Jake Guentzel and not Evgeny Kuznetsov, who mustered no response to his Game 2 benching — exactly what we were told was going to prevent a repeat of the Florida series last spring, and so far the results are the same.

Brind’Amour tried to say then that sweep wasn’t really a sweep and he seemed on the verge Thursday of saying the Rangers’ 3-0 lead wasn’t really a 3-0 lead, but playoff games aren’t determined by shot totals or scoring chances. The Rangers didn’t have as many of either, but they had more goals. Only one thing matters. It’s a make or miss game.

“They win games a different way than we do, and we still have to find a way to keep the puck out of our net and score more than they do,” Hurricanes captain Jordan Staal said. “They did a good job of scoring on their opportunities and they’ve got some special players we’ve got to stop and a goaltender we’ve got to find a way to beat. So that’s their game plan. It’s working for them obviously. And our game plan has to change a bit.”

Put a pin in that thought until the season’s over, whenever that may be. That conversation — about style, philosophy, personnel, all of it — is coming, even if the Hurricanes find a way out of this blind alley they shouldn’t even be in.

The conversation now is what it always is. Focus on the next game. Focus on the next shift. It’s true that the Hurricanes have been the better team at five-on-five. If their power play ever shows up, they might have better odds at flipping the script than the average team in a 3-0 hole.

But that’s what they said before Game 3, and the story was the same. And now even closer to its conclusion.

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This story was originally published May 9, 2024, 11:30 PM.

New York

Instead of a road win, or a power-play goal, or much of anything to show for their commendable effort in the first two games of this series, the Carolina Hurricanes now have questions. Lots of questions. They’ll bring a planeload of them home with them, and very few answers.

That is the way of the postseason, sometimes, as the twists and turns of a series loop back on each other and the pitter-patter of little issues becomes a drumbeat of failure. This is where the Hurricanes find themselves after Tuesday’s 4-3 double-overtime loss to the New York Rangers, and even with the additional period and a half, the verses were different from Game 1 but the chorus was the same.

The goaltending wasn’t good enough to win it. Their five-on-five dominance hasn’t been rewarded. And their special teams have been an unmitigated catastrophe.

The Hurricanes had a one-goal lead in the third period Tuesday before the Rangers tied it with a power-play goal and won it with a power-play goal. Between those two back-breaking goals, the Hurricanes had two power plays of their own, either of which would have won the game and brought home-ice advantage back to Raleigh instead of just simmering frustration.

“We’re right there,” said Jake Guentzel, who scored twice in his best game of the playoffs so far. “It’s a small margin for error in the playoffs. We’ve got to buckle down on the power play and find a way to get one there.”

Two one-goal losses. Minus-4 on special teams. A recipe for disaster. Seven of the Hurricanes’ last 11 playoff games have been one-goal losses. If the playoffs are a contest of fine margins, the Hurricanes are ending up on the wrong side too often.

So now, questions.

Lots of questions.

Is it time to give Pyotr Kochetkov a look in goal? Frederik Andersen gave up a ton of rebounds and the game-tying and game-winning goals both came after shots he initially saved. Andersen hasn’t been terrible, but he hasn’t outplayed Igor Shesterkin, either.

What about the penalty-kill, which has allowed four power-play goals in two games? The Rangers were 2-for-7 on the power play Tuesday, which suggests that it may be a problem of volume as much as execution.

The Hurricanes are too often playing into the Rangers’ hands that way. It contributed to Evgeny Kuznetsov’s benching for Game 2, after Adam Fox goaded him into a retaliatory cross-check, and Fox did it again Tuesday. Fox snuck in a punch to Guentzel’s face in a scrum, then buckled like his lights went out when Guentzel returned fire, drawing a penalty. (To that point, it was Guentzel’s best shot of the playoffs, a distinction it did not hold for long.)

At a certain point, that’s not on the Rangers. Leopard, spots, etc. It’s on the Hurricanes for giving them the opportunities. Which they did over and over again. (Andrei Svechnikov, master of the offensive-zone penalty, took two of them.)

And then there’s the power play, officially 0-for-10 in the series but really 0-for-8, given that two opportunities were cut short immediately by Hurricanes penalties. The Hurricanes have retreated to their worst instincts, passing the puck passively around the perimeter, waiting for perfection instead of putting the puck on net.

Can the power play even be fixed at this point, before it’s too late? Has it become too predicable, an open book to playoff opponents who have figured out how to stop it? Given how close the Hurricanes came to winning one or both of these games, is it too late already?

“We have to be sharper,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “We have to get inside. We’re on the outside and it’s just not how we do it, anyway. We’ve got to get back to doing it how we know how.”

The series isn’t over yet. Far from it. The Hurricanes are headed home with a chance to come back here next week on even terms, asking all the questions for a change. It’s what the Rangers did to them after falling behind 2-0 on the road in 2022.

But unlike their power play through two games, the Hurricanes will actually have to take advantage.

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