For the first time in the 2016-17, the Carolina Hurricanes will enter a game with a winning streak. The Hurricanes will be looking to claw back to .500 since they started the season 1-1-2. The game is also the fourth of 5 on the current home stand, and a win would push the team’s mark to a solid 3-1 heading into Sunday’s finale.
Off the ice, the game is the first in the “Hurricanes Homegrown Series” featuring local food, beer, music and art. Local food blog eatRaleigh offered a great read on the menu and series in general.
The Montreal Canadiens enter the game off to a red hot start at 13-2-2 and sitting atop the Eastern Conference with 28 points. Despite the strong resume thus far, the Habs actually enter on a slight down swing having lost 2 straight (1 in overtime) entering the match up with the Hurricanes. The other burning question is who the Hurricanes will see in net, as the game is the front half of a back-to-back with the second game being at home against Toronto. The question is an important one. Carey Price enters on Vezina pace with a 1.63 goals against average and scintillating .948 save percentage. Other than a horrendous 10-goal outing against Columbus, Montoya has been okay, but like the vast majority of NHL goalies just is not in the same category as Carey Price.
On the Hurricanes side, the team will very simply be looking to build upon consecutive strong outings against similarly strong teams.
‘What I’m watching’ for the Hurricanes versus Canadiens
1) More of the same at level 2
My preview for Tuesday’s game against San Jose placed an emphasis on solidifying the second level of combinations. Riding Jeff Skinner, the top line was off to a strong start scoring-wise, but in the early going Jordan Staal had been unable to rekindle magic with Joakim Nordstro and Andrej Nestrasil. And on defense, Jaccob Slavin and Brett Pesce have risen up to become the team’s top defense pairing, but veterans Ron Hainsey and Justin Faulk were both off to slow starts defensively in my opinion.
Despite not scoring on Tuesday, Jordan Staal’s new line with Sebastian Aho and Teuvo Teravainen was tremendous in their second game together mustering a 2-minute shift of offensive zone time and a slew of shots on goal. Teravainen had 6 in the first period alone. And Justin Faulk and Ron Hainsey were paired together for Faulk’s return to the lineup and played the good version of quiet with sound defensive hockey that contributed to a 1-0 win without requiring goalie Cam Ward to stand on his head.
The play of these combination is critical to making the lineup deeper and giving Coach Bill Peters a larger core that he can lean on, so on Friday I will be watching and hoping for a continuation from Aho/Staal/Teravainen and Hainsey/Faulk.
2) Sound play
Except for a couple first period break downs defending the rush, the Hurricanes played a solid game defensively on Tuesday and gave Ward a reasonable quantity and quality of chances to handle. Against a Montreal team that has been scoring in bunches this season across multiple lines, Friday will require another sound effort defensively. I will be watching early to see if the Hurricanes can pick up where they left off on Tuesday.
3) Goaltending
One might argue that I should at least temporarily remove this from the required list based on Ward’s strong play of late. Going with the superstition thing, I will instead leave it here and hope that Cam Ward continues his strong play of late.
The puck drops at 7:30pm at PNC Arena.
Go Canes!
If it wasn’t for the fact that our goalie situation is WELL ESTABLISHED…WARD is not consistently a good goalie…I’d agree with some optimism!
However, we know it won’t last, he will revert to form, and give up a soft goal at the worst possible time!
By the time RF FIGURES this out… the season will be lost, and
MAYBE THE CANES, as well…??!!
I think your perspective might benefit if you can take off the blinders and try to watch objectively on a game to game basis.
Ward has actually been at least decent and more often good or better of late.
I too voted for another option in net this summer. So far, I still stand by that opinion.
But at the same time, it makes no sense to beat the “Ward stinks” drum even after games when he doesn’t stink.
Like you Matt, I hoped to see the team make a change at goal last summer, but understood that there really weren’t any good alternatives without spending a lot more money or giving up too much talent.
I think when RF resigned Ward he was banking on seeing measurable improvement from last season, something that was certainly possible, but far from certain.
But so far this season, aside from his first couple of games, that’s exactly what we’ve been getting. I think most would agree that the Canes beat Montreal last night in spite of not playing particularly well. Although there were other factors that helped, that usually means the goaltender was the star player of the night.
I guess what I’m getting at is that right now Ward is doing everything we could hope for and more, so let’s not worry about what could go wrong just yet.
It’s Montoya…5th backup goalie in a row that the Canes have seen at home.
Ward has been good as of late, but he’s always been a streaky goaltender (as many are) with consistency being one of his main problems. Hopefully he stays hot a while longer, but inevitably I think we will see his numbers at the end of the year look very similar to what they have looked like over the last 3-4 years. So I feel puckgod’s frustration.
If the Canes win tonight, they will have won 6 out of 16 games, and be at best in 14th place out of 16 in the conference. I struggle with calling this .500 but I get your point and they will have moved in the right direction.
TSA line was amazing the last 2 games, would be great to see that continue tonight. Even better would be to get 2 lines going at the same time.
Andrew Schnittker who writes here and also at NCSU Technician uses the term “hockey .500” which is kind of the asterisk that accounts for the fact that you don’t have to win 1/2 the games to be .500 with NHL’s rules.