For anyone who has not already had it on their calendar for a couple months, Sunday is the Caniac Carnival which is an official rite of passage out of the offseason and into preseason hockey. The team will enter its third day of practice when the first group steps on the ice at PNC Arena at 10:30am on Sunday.
Today’s batch of external reading has a few articles on the Caniac Carnival and preseason action so far plus a mix of other articles.
The Caniac Carnival
For anyone who is not already scheduled to be there but is looking for inexpensive fun mid-day on Sunday, the schedule and details for the Caniac Carnival can be found at CarolinaHurricanes.com.
Canes and Coffee offered a ‘what I’m watching’ style preview for the Sunday practices and included a ‘best food truck options’ poll to help people plan lunch.
Carolina Hurricanes training camp
Tom Edwards from Section 328 offers a who’s who of the full list of players at the Carolina Hurricanes training camp.
The second part of Canes and Coffee’s training camp preview (with links to the first part) takes and early look at sorting out the forward lines and defense pairings.
Looking forward to the Hurricanes 2017-18 season
Ron Francis recaps the offseason and previews the 2017-18 season in an interview with Michael Smith at CarolinaHurricanes.com.
Jonathan Wagner at CBTS Blog pulls out his crystal ball and suggests three potential breakout players for the 2017-18 season.
Jim Cerny from Sporting News previews the Hurricanes 2017-18 season and suggests that the team could be on the cusp of ending its playoff drought.
Hopefully people saw the Peters interview tape today after practice.
Did you see the way his eyes lit up when he was talking about Necas? He actually made the statement that Necas is playing right now in a way to make the team. Very impressive.
I will be there for most of tomorrow.
The groupings today are fascinating. The first group is only players with NHL experience–except Fleury (Carrick is in this group, not sure if that is about his competing with Fleury or about his 2 NHL games in 2016). The second group has a few players with some limited NHL experience: Miller, Samuelson, Nedeljkovic. It sure looks like the Raleigh group and the Charlotte group.
To get ready for the first game, I watched the Minnesota game from March 16. Several things jumped out in light of training camp questions.
1) The pairings of Pesce/Hanifin and Slavin/Faulk looked good.
2) I think a lot of folks are underestimating Derek Ryan. He is a competent NHL player. He wins face-offs, makes better-than-average passes, and actually scored the first goal of this game in close to the net on the power-play. Both he and Stempniak were solid all game.
3) Teravainen is on the cusp of becoming a very good forward. Most shifts he was the best player on the ice in this game. The TSA line had at least two shifts where they kept the puck in the offensive zone 45-60 seconds. TT was moving through traffic with the puck on his stick, making excellent passes, fighting in the corners, keeping the puck in at the point. He was really noticeable this game.
4) The Power Play (in spite of giving up a bad short-handed goal) made great improvements over the course of the year. With the addition of Williams, it has a chance to be top 10, which is BP’s stated goal for all aspects of the Canes’ game.
5) Don’t sleep on Wallmark. With all the excitement about Necas, Kuokkanen, Foegele, and (my own admittedly) Roy, we are forgetting that Wallmark has already shown he can compete at the NHL level.
6) Watching that game made me think that all the optimism is realistic. The team has the talent to make the playoffs. The addition of Darling, Williams, Kruger, van Riemsdyk, should really improve the areas of weakness from last year.
I liked a lot of what I saw today. Darling made some killer saves; had Peters banging on the glass they were that good. The more I see this group, the more I feel we don;t need to trade for that other scoring piece. If we can keep playing with this pace, we should be fine.