Thank you and request for help
First, I would like to extend a huge thank you to everyone who spent part of the 2018-19 Carolina Hurricanes hockey time at Canes and Coffee and a special thank you to the regular patrons of the Coffee Shop whose opinions, insight and friendly debate have become the best part of Canes and Coffee. Also, for those newer Canes fans who joined because of the contagious fun during the 2018-19 season, I am thrilled to see our Hurricanes hockey community growing again.
If you appreciated Canes and Coffee’s daily Canes coverage during the 2018-19 season, please consider a small ‘cup of coffee’ size contribution to help fund our operations. We run on a lean budget, but it still is not free to keep the site up. The hope is to do another round of required and possibly some extra maintenance during the off-season, so contributions are appreciated in either of two ways.
In addition, we just started a relationship with Fanatics. Canes and Coffee will receive a portion of purchases made through our links.
Summer plans for Canes and Coffee
With the short gap (Hooray! Finally!!) between the end of the season and start of the off-season festivities including the draft, prospect camp and free agency, the tentative plan is to continue with daily Canes coverage through the front part of the summer and possibly take a short break during the back half of the summer.
In addition to the regular Daily Cup of Joe articles, the hope is to restart The Coffee Shop posts with reader polls and conversation questions most, if not all, Mondays.
Carry forwards from the 2018-19 regular season and playoffs
Now four days past the sudden ending of the 2018-19 season and with a couple days to digest all that happened, timing is good for a first look at what carries forward from the 2018-19 season.
Learning what it takes X2
I think the most significant thing that comes out of the 2018-19 is learning what it takes to be successful at the NHL level in two regards. First, the young team learned what is required to grind out a playoff berth through ups and downs and a long NHL season even in the face of adversity. The arduous task that lasted the better part of four months likely played a role in the team finally hitting a wall, but I also think that the grind starting in January will benefit the team in terms of building resiliency and learning how to stay focused and hungry each and every game to collect every point possible. That should benefit his young group into the future.
I also think that both the partial playoff success and ultimate failure will pay huge dividends in the future. The team faced its share of adversity in the Capitals series and chances to quit on the series before prevailing and also experienced more success against the Islanders. Knowing just how hard it can be to prevail will also be valuable going forward. In addition, the series sweep at the hands of the Bruins should do more harm than good long-term. The series shows just how fleeting momentum and success can be in the playoffs. The Hurricanes seemed to have game 1 in hand and paused only briefly. Then bam! — The series is suddenly over. That too should be a learning point going forward.
I think it can be underestimated how much of a learning process it can be for young and previously unsuccessful teams to push over the hump. For multiple years, the Hurricanes had mostly been able to muster some kind of a push but not one that was big enough or soon enough to make the playoffs. This group now knows what that extra level looks like and feels like which should make it easier to reach it again instead of grasping and missing as in the past.
Leadership
Arguably greater than anything else will be what was learned in terms of leadership. The future leadership of the Carolina Hurricanes is incredibly young. A full season with Justin Williams doing an incredible job of leading creates a blueprint for the next captain of this team but maybe even more significantly the entire roster. (Good teams in the NHL have leadership in layers.) Sebastian Aho spent the season in the locker next to Williams seeing how he interacted with team mates, how he interacted with the media, how he made things fun when appropriate, but also how he knew when he needed to call the team out and demand more. In that regard, the Justin Williams’ stamp on the culture of the organization during the 2018-19 season will be felt for many years after he is gone (hopefully not just yet).
A measuring point for management
If the players stay hungry for more and keep working hard, this team should become better just from young players continuing to mature, but there is also room for Don Waddell and company to make moves to improve this team from outside. In playing at a peak level for an extended stretch of the 2018-19 season and then doing so again in the 2019 NHL Playoffs, management should have a better read on where exactly the peak version of this team lands and where it has deficiencies or weaknesses that need to be addressed to ultimately reach an even higher level.
Individual players’ self assessments
As successful as this team was, it still came up short and in being swept by the Bruins did so in a significant way in the end. On the one hand, the group did well, but on the other hand a good number of players could have done more especially in the Boston series. With a significant number of Hurricanes players reaching the NHL playoffs for the first time, the past five weeks have been a brand new experience. With the summer to reflect, each individual player should hopefully come away with areas for improvement and a hunger to be even better the next time around.
What say you Canes fans?
1) What do you see as the most significant carry forward(s) from the 2018-19 regular season?
2) What do you see as the biggest carry forwards and also hopeful lessons learned from the playoffs?
Go Canes!
1. No more “Candy Canes” The second half of the season, a opposing team goal didn’t send me into panic that the guys would fold.
2. A taste of what success can be like. Plus it put the ”
Town of Carolina” back on the map for Canadian hockey people. š
3. I support Canes and Coffee on Patreon, and urge everybody to chip in as well. It’s a cheap investment in rational hockey discourse.
We will need to replace Michael Ferland’s grit up front. A scoring, hitting power forward who can fight.
In addition, we need a gadfly of the Brad Marchand type.
Finally, we need to recognize that our depth at defense is a myth. Fleury wound up averaging a few minutes per game. By the time Boston started on us, they were facing an exhausted 5 man defense. We need one or two defensive defensemen with plenty of grit like Adam Larsson, Eric Gudbranson, or Darnel Nurse.
I do not think we can afford to suffer under the same myth of goalie depth that we have with the myth of defense depth. Three NHL calibre goalkeepers is a good number. Pietr, Curtis and Ned should do it. But maybe even one more.
1. How important Justin Williams was to this season’s success. I’ve always felt that the captaincy in hockey was an overrated virtue left over from a bygone era. Evidently Bill Peters was of the same opinion. It’ difficult to overstate the impact JW had on the players, and getting them to buy into a style of play that up until January had only shown glimpses of success. It was only a year, but his impact on the Canes organization and community will be felt for a long time. The difficult question is if he decides to retire, who can possibly follow his captaincy without some amount of drop off? A period of adjustment is coming. How long and the impact will be determined but it could be a bit of a painful adjustment.
2. You can’t play must win games for the three months heading into the playoffs. Agree with the earlier post about team depth. Having bodies to fill in is not depth. Bodies that can play at the NHL level is what is necessary to go a long way in the playoffs. It’s as much about attrition as it is talent.
The most significant carry forward is that there is only one way to play. Aggressive, all out, attacking style, all game long.
It takes a post season to truly understand it. Get away from your team game, and you are toast in the playoffs.
While not absolutely necessary during the regular season, a regular season full of proper āpracticeā is the best way to prepare for the post season. Habits carry forward.
Tampa may have learned the lesson this year too, they did a lot of showing off and goofing around during the regular season. Then got trounced in the playoffs.
I hope the biggest carry forward is that the team is able to start on time, or at least not dig themselves a hole so deep it takes a miracle run to dig out;.
I hope to see the Canes comfortably hold on to the 2nd or third in the metro from start of season on, the team simply ran out of juice by the end this year.
Also, I think there is some depth of defense, I was hoping to see Jake Bean get a chance with some minutes in the playoffs but he didn’t.
Fleury wasn’t trusted and once TVR went down it was a 5-men show that eventually caught up with the team.
You have to play 6 D men, however much you do or do not trust them.
Shortening the defensive bench may work for a game or two but it comes back to haunt you big time.
Another lesson is the importance of special teams. The Canes have to find a way, be it coaching, systems or minor change in personnel to do better on the powerplay next year.
PP is a gift, the Canes haven’t accepted it for years.
You can go pretty durn far without it, but you can’t go all the way.
I hope management sees that this roster, though great, needs a few updates to be truly difference making.
We need to upgrade our forward scoring by one or two guys without losing team toughness.
There are options available, from cap casualties such as Tyler Johnson and Nylander, possibly under performers with upside like Paljarvi in Edm, to UFAs like Zuccerello, Duchene, Zingel.
I’m not exactly sure what we need, and we should focus on resigning the good core of the Canes, but I am hoping we can find the right piece or two to upgrade the forwards.
One of the carry-forwards that I have been working through in my mind – this is my first time presenting it, so consider it thoughts in development – is that for the younger players in Charlotte their ability to stick with the team is primarily based on how they play the game. Do they play it RBA’s way? We have a lot of young high-skill players in Charlotte (Necas, Saarela, Poturalski, Kuokkanen, Geekie to name a few) but a player like Foegele is going to keep getting NHL ice time even when he isn’t productive; he is grit and grind (with occasional brilliance, of course). Brown gets the call-up when we are short a forward, although Poturalski was having a stellar year in Charlotte with a solid 2-way game The only.
I wonder going forward how much of a chance our young skill players are going to get on a RBA-coached team. This may push Roy, a quintessential 4th liner with size who owns the dots, into the Canes lineup next year over a Saarela with his shot or any of the others.
To me, it will be a watchpoint for how Waddell handles the offseason with trade/signings as a starter.
There is an axiom in hockey that you look for a 24% turnover in roster from year to year driven, in part, by the desire to bring in hungry players and to keep the players on the roster hungry and competitive. I will be looking to see where the team looks to get it’s new players and how much space will be available for a Checkers player to latch on with the Canes next TC and PS.
I think your observation and point are good ones. Brind’Amour’s system is ‘forecheck first’, so it makes sense that hard-charging, skating, physical forecheckers would have an advantage in terms of winning/keeping roster spots. But ideal is to either have players of the mold that also have higher-end scoring talent or to be able to fit in a balance more skilled scoring types.
Good point. We saw the limits of this system in the Boston series where Canes scoring was simply not happening.
It goes back to my point regarding the need to upgrade the offense and that the team carries too many good 4th liners.
Saku, Fogele, Mcginn, Mckegg, Martinook, Brown.
This is likely part of the reason the powerplay has not been a strength for the team.
Powerplay is where you need skilled playmakers for the setup, but the Canes have too many “just crash the net” personalities.
When the D fails to engage offense is hard to come by.