So I just finished writing a long and detailed article entitles “Seeking heroes…and taking the next step” only to see it seemingly disappear into the ether of the internet. If this is what the internet looks like post net neutrality, I’m quitting. 🙂
More seriously, I do not have the energy to re-write that article right now, so I will instead pull out something else that I have some scribbled notes on.
In the NHL, there is enough parity that there is no such things as a sure win. Bottom teams beat top teams on a fairly regular basis. But good teams do seem to have an uncanny knack for winning most of the games that they should and also rebounding and cutting losing streaks short.
For the young Carolina Hurricanes, I would say that this is still a work in progress. Right when the team was surging and trying to play its way back into the 2016-17 season, it somehow managed to lose to bottom dwellers Arizona and Colorado.
The 2017-18 season has featured a few puzzling losses to. The team entered Thanksgiving week generally playing good hockey only to lay an egg twice before eking out an overtime win against Nashville salvage something from the week.
The Hurricanes near-term schedule features a couple important rounds of games that the team needs to win. It starts with a huge match up in Buffalo on Friday night. The Sabres are near the bottom of the NHL, are 3-5-2 in their past 10 games and played and traveled on Thursday night to boot. The game looks favorable for the Hurricanes and could push the road trip’s record to a respectable 2-2-2. Or the game could prove to be a huge disappointment and see the team return home with a 1-3-2 mark. Games like this can swing trajectory and either eliminate or create new bouts with adversity that can weigh on a team over the course of a long 82-game season.
And then after a few more games on the road, the Hurricanes again get a run of three straight home games during the holidays. After what will probably prove to be a treading water at best run of nine games with eight on the road, it is critical that the team capitalize on its next batch of home games.
Can the Hurricanes find the right combination of soundness, determination and high level of play to methodically crank out wins in these games? That is what we will be watching starting on Friday night and continuing over the next few weeks.
Go Canes!
Matt–that is a tough to have an entire post disappear. While your comment was facetious, losing net neutrality could make things pretty frustrating.
Speaking of which, you are correct that losing to Buffalo would make the road trip ugly. Whereas, if the Canes can pick up Ws tonight and tomorrow, they will be within a game or two of the last playoff spot. The Islanders might be hitting a stretch where they are giving up too many goals, the Rangers seem to be up and down much like the Canes. So there is opportunity. On the other hand, Philadelphia and Montreal are also playing themselves into the Wild Card competition. All this just magnifies the importance of winning a game against one of the few obviously inferior opponents. Of course, Buffalo has given up exactly two goals in regulation for five straight games, so as you stated, by no means an easy opponent.
Canes Country linked to a blog with more of an emphasis on how professional bettors see games. The piece included some analysis that indicated that prior to the Vegas game, the Canes had only a 4.9% chance of having the record they have. In other words, in 95% of the possible outcomes, Carolina was doing a little to quite a bit better. Maybe the Kruger goal is the beginning of a regression to the mean. Let’s hope tonight sees more favorable things happening on the ice.
Winning favorable games has been a sore spot for the Canes for years. This is a culture thing that has to change.
If we miss the playoffs by 4 or less points, we will look back on the Colorado and Arizona games as huge. The Buffalo game is just as huge and deserves as good of an effort as Nashville and CBJ.
I think that the preaseason/early season petition was exactly this: the change in the culture. I am picturing JW talking about this back then that the Canes are on the way to fight every game without looking back into possible underachievements. That this team, right now, can make the difference. Thus I think the most unfavour to the mission was the co-captaincy. It was to be to set the tone that “things would just gel in” without any serious navigation.
Nothing new, we all know this, just ranting.
Well, at least we can commiserate. I was very surprised by the captaincy decision too. It generally takes much longer to change the culture without changes in leadership.
I do not know if the team will show up. We tend to play down to the level of competition. We really need this win. I hope we can put it together and not have one of the offense, defense or goalie mess up again. I think we have the personal to be a decent team, we just keep making mistakes of the big variety. We seem to find ways to lose rather then finding ways to win. I have no idea who would be in goal tonight but I would like to see Darling sit. Cam is the goalie giving us the best chance to win right now.
Nice that it will not be a 10PM game.
One advantage to the late starting times…you can get enough alcohol into the system to make the game more palatable…eh?
…less painful that way…
Sometimes the internet sucks, Matt. Sorry to hear about the post loss.
You might want to consider composing on another site – Google Docs regularly saves off your document as you write. Then copy, past, format here. Just an idea.
A win in Buffalo can salvage the road trip. Winning tomorrow would turn the recent stretch into a relative success.