NHL
NHL Playoffs
RALEIGH, N.C. — Three days ago, way back at the start of the Eastern Conference final, the Carolina Hurricanes followed the script after another loss to the Florida Panthers.
They focused on the positives: plenty of five-on-five chances, a power-play that improved as the game progressed and a result that was born primarily, they seemed to think, of isolated mistakes that were all their own. We lost, they were saying, but we played well.
Advertisement
They weren’t wrong, either. Not necessarily. Results are binary, but process is not.
To believe that, though, by definition, is to believe something else. The flip side of “we played well but lost” tends to be “they played badly and still beat us.” That can be a scary proposition. And on Thursday night, the Hurricanes watched it come to life.
Florida won 5-0. The Hurricanes are down 2-0 in the series. And the panic button — unavoidably, necessarily and belatedly — may have been triggered.
Beyond that, if Tuesday was them falling back on their priors and saying, loss aside, they largely played like themselves, Thursday was closer to the inverse. It felt like a hockey team looking in a mirror and not recognizing the reflection. It felt, nearly from the moment the puck dropped, like an identity crisis.
“I think we came out with the right intentions, but it was trying to do too much,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “And then we’re not doing the things that we do as a team that normally help us. We were just … I didn’t know what I was watching in the first period.
“I said the other day, the margin here is tight. We’re not going to beat this team if we’re not on the same page. And tonight, for whatever reason — like I said, the intentions were good, everyone’s trying, ‘OK, I’m gonna do this’ — but that’s not how we do it. And it just backfired.”
That was a bad hockey game, and a dull one. Somehow, though, in all its badness and dullness, there were surreal moments. For one, the crowd at Lenovo Center chanted “shoot the puck” several times throughout the second period. The Lenovo Center, home of the “Corsi Canes,” who’ve led the NHL in shots on net since time immemorial — the team that almost hung 100 attempts on the Washington Capitals in 63:06 of playoff hockey a couple of weeks ago.
Advertisement
This wasn’t an instance of a home crowd that lost its barometer on what constitutes a normal amount of shots, either. They were mad, and they were right to be. The Hurricanes did need to shoot the puck. They had seven shots through 40 minutes of play and were down 4-0 in a playoff game. That’s when hockey fans return to factory settings, regardless of what they’ve seen over the last seven seasons.
Taylor Hall, added via trade in January, is new to the mix. He’s 33 now, pretty firmly in the seasoned, thoughtful veteran phase of his career, and he’s seen plenty. He’s been part of good teams and terrible ones. He’s won a Hart Trophy and gotten benched by the 2024-25 Chicago Blackhawks. This is a man who’s seen the pendulum swing.
After the game, he was asked about the chants and whether hesitancy had entered the picture.
“A little bit,” he said. “I mean, you can always point to times on the ice where you need to shoot it, but you need to also have some freedom to make plays and whatnot. But yeah, when we look up at the shot clock and see that, that’s just not our game, right? That’s just not how we play. We generate offense by shooting pucks and getting them back. And then we draw a penalty, we get a rebound, we generate momentum and O-zone faceoffs by doing that, and we just weren’t able to do it. We had chances to shoot and we didn’t.
“So yeah, I think we’re all a little bit at a loss.”
Jordan Staal, captain of the Hurricanes since 2017 and a foundational piece since 2011, is an avatar for Brind’Amour. The two share a playing style — Brind’Amour won two Selkes and Staal has come close — and a philosophy.
“He’s really been the most, probably, important player that we’ve had here. Just solid,” Brind’Amour said before the series. “(Someone) you can build around. Consistent. All those words that you use to describe people that you love. That’s Jordan Staal.”
Advertisement
After Game 1, nobody threaded the needle better. Staal wasn’t thrilled with his team’s performance. He wasn’t excusing it. He also wasn’t willing to toss the whole thing, tip to tail, in the trash can.
That day, he was asked whether Carolina’s struggles with the Panthers, after five straight conference final losses across two series, were as mental as they are physical, and whether they wondered whether they could actually win.
“Yeah, this game is mental,” he said. “I mean, it’s all about the brain and your focus and the thoughts that can creep in. And it’s got to be the thoughts we’ve been thinking all year. And that’s playing our game and focusing on our shifts and our battles and doing what we do. When you let those little thoughts like that come in, it never looks good.”
This time, he didn’t bother bringing up near-misses or individual mistakes or specific, fixable issues with the penalty kill. This time, he didn’t say they were close.
“Tonight was just not good,” he said. “There wasn’t really much to hang your hat on at all.”
And that brings us back to Brind’Amour, memorably defiant in 2023 in saying that his team’s process and effort stopped a sweep from being a sweep, a coach that believes that his team wins hockey games in one particular way and plays hockey games at one nonnegotiable level, whether in October or May.
He started to echo Staal, but stopped short.
“We gotta just … not throw this game away, but we gotta learn from it — what doesn’t work — and give yourself a chance,” he said. “That’s what we didn’t do. I thought we did the other night. Obviously, same result. But clearly, you go off the script and it’s not going to go well. So that’s the lesson learned there.”
The process, it seems, was off. Before he was done with his postgame media session, he landed another lesson. Maybe a more important one.
Advertisement
“Sometimes it’s easier to recover from a game like that because there’s nothing good (that comes) out of it,” he said. “If you’re close, a play here or there makes a difference. There was nothing good in this game for us.”
He might have been correct in his assessment in Game 1. He certainly was after Game 2.
(Top photo: James Guillory / Imagn Images)
Sean Gentille is a senior writer for The Athletic covering the NHL. He previously covered Pittsburgh sports with the The Athletic and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the NHL for Sporting News, and he’s a graduate of the University of Maryland. Follow Sean on Twitter @seangentille

source