Recap of Carolina Hurricanes 4-3 loss to the Washington Capitals
After a rousing 6-4 win only six days ago, round two of the Canes versus the Caps over the holidays took place on Friday night at PNC Arena.
The game started well for the Canes. The Canes were the better team out of the gate. The Capitals pushed back. But then ironically after a weak power play, the Carolina Hurricanes took over the first period. Some combination of a familiar fault of not always getting enough traffic to the front of the net and a legitimately hot goalie stymied what was a strong first period for the Hurricanes. The good guys were the better team as the period wore on and posted an 18 to 7 shot advantage but were unable to dent Ilya Samsonov. The period finished with a 0-0 tie.
The second period saw the game reverse course. Richard Panik broke the ice for the Capitals early in the second period on a rush around Jake Gardiner and scored on a weird series of events. Petr Mrazek made the initial save, but as he did so, he drifted wide of the net. The puck then seemed to carom off of both Gardiner and Brett Pesce before rolling across the goal line. Washington would strike again on the power play when John Carlson showed why he is leading NHL defensemen in scoring. With Alexander Ovechkin staked out in his office at the top of the face-off circle on the power play, Carlson leveraged the attention focused on Ovechkin to find a passing lane right to Evgeny Kuznetsov for a back door tap in. In general, the Hurricanes struggles in the second period. After a dominant first period in terms of puck possession, the Hurricanes had puck management issues and played too much of the period defending under duress. The period finished at 2-0 and set the stage for a wild third period.
Down 2-0 and needing a goal to get back into the game, the Hurricanes got exactly that early in the third period when Jordan Staal deftly tipped a Brett Pesce shot to pull the Hurricanes within a goal at 2-1. But then the negative part of the mixed bag of a third period reared its head. Erik Haula took an unnecessary offensive zone penalty, and the Capitals capitalized to regain a two-goal lead. Then the Hurricanes were passive defending off the rush leading to another Capitals goal. Dougie Hamilton was beaten at the defensive blue line. The Hurricanes still had enough players back, but the combination of Andrei Svechnikov sort of generically filling the middle of the ice without identifying passing lanes and Warren Foegele stopping skating at the defensive blue line left Jakub Vrana alone on the back door to put the Capitals up by a commanding 4-1 lead. Rather than being a nail in the coffin, that goal just seemed to trigger a frenetic ending. The Hurricanes pushed pace, opened things up and attacked. Teuvo Teravainen tallied on a Sebastian Aho pass on the power play to get the Canes back to 4-2. And Ryan Dzingel fired a laser just under the bar on a pretty Martin Necas pass on the power play to pull the Hurricanes back to within 4-3 still with more than 12 minutes remaining in the game. At the point, the rally was on. The Hurricanes had multiple good chances including their second (or was it more?) post of the game. But the rally was cut a bit short when Dougie Hamilton took an ill-advised retaliation penalty with a punch to the back of the head of T.J. Oshie after a check he did not like on the end boards. With only 2:43 remaining, that penalty more or less ended the game early. The Hurricanes were not really able to establish offensive zone possession in the waning moments after killing off the penalty.
The third period was a weird mix of good and bad. On the one hand, the Hurricanes pushed back twice even once down 4-1. But the downside was a return of taking too many penalties. Two costly ones in the third period might have been the difference between an almost and a comeback win.
Player and other notes
1) Erik Haula
Aside from the costly penalty in the third period that I noted above, I really liked Haula’s game. He is the one player who consistently goes to the front of the net. The Hurricanes need more of this on many nights. Haula had a deflection in front in the first period that just skittered wide of the net, and he had a deflection in the second period that bounced up and off the cross bar. And in total, he just gets the need to go fight for position at the top of the crease when the puck is in the offensive zone.
2) Weird night for the power play
The Hurricanes looked very good on a first period 4-on-3 and then abysmal on multiple other standard 5-on-4 power plays through two periods. Then just when the writers were penning comments about special teams being a big part of the difference (the Capitals had two power play goals), the Hurricanes scored twice on the power play in the third period to get back into the game.
3) Couple tough penalties in the third period
Twice in the third period the Hurricanes scored to push back into the game. The ill-advised and unnecessary penalties by Erik Haula and Dougie Hamilton short-circuited both rallies.
4) Andrei Svechnikov
A bit under the radar because he did not score a goal, Andrei Svechnikov had a huge game offensively. With the puck on his stick in the offensive zone, he was a step or two faster than whoever was trying to defend him all night. The result was multiple times where he wheeled around the offensive zone assessing and looking for scoring chances. In addition to collecting two assists, he narrowly missed over the top of the net on a grade A chance, got the puck to the front of the net via pass a couple times and had a couple other power forward rushes to carry the puck toward the net.
5) Bigger picture
As far as losses go, Friday’s was more a reminder that the margin for error is small against good teams than a bad effort. The first period was very good. Aside from the couple costly errors, the third period was much more good than bad. And even the second period that was the Canes worst was not horrible.
And stepping outside of the single game, the Hurricanes are off to a respectable 2-1 record for the seven-game road trip. Ideal would be to repeat that and then take on a win in the home stand finale to reach 5-2 which would easily be a positive.
Next up for the Hurricanes is game 4 of the home stand on Tuesday against the Philadelphia Flyers.
Go Canes!
Checking my schedule (and tickets) next up is TB on Sunday.
Huge crowd! Looking for positives I checked YTD NHL attendance figures. http://www.espn.com/nhl/attendance The Canes are up to 22nd in average/game.
Also, did you vote today? Turbo times ten again. NHL.com/vote
This was a game where the bounces just did not go our way. We were every bit as good as the caps. Yes, our second period was not so good but neither was the caps first or third. The caps first goal was a lucky bounce. I think it was their 3rd goal where OV took his patterned shot on their PP and missed but a perfect bounce off the end board for a tap in on the other side of the net. I do not think that was planned, I think it was a miss. We had several cases where we did not get the bounces.
This could have easily gone the other way. It just was not our night. We tend to focus on where we messed up. The caps had their issues as well. Two good teams, one gets the luck, the other does not.
The Hamilton penalty at the end of the game was not smart. Very dumb thing to do given where the game was at. Even great players make mistakes. Gardner continues to miss play things and get us in trouble. At this point I do not see why we do not sit him and let Fleury and TVR take the third D group. He is bringing very little. Not sure he will improve. I like him but too many mess-ups.
Agree with the last paragraph. Not sure about the “great player” tag yet. As soon as I think Hamilton has turned a corner he does something like that in a pressure situation. Makes me fear how he will Be in the playoffs again.
Got a kick out of the social media scrum over the Oshie/Hamilton interaction. Hit wasn’t that bad IMO. Dougie retaliating was super soft. Retaliating is always soft, but even worse considering the circumstances. Our local media does not get it. They may need to stick to basketball. Oshie did embellish the punch. Went down like he was shot.
Oshie is the Capitals version of Brad Marchand. Our 3rd goal was scored on a power play that resulted from a vicious, with intent to harm, cross check to the back of Fogele. Oshie is skilled and dirty. We will never know what Oshie did to get under Hamilton’s skin when Dougie was hit in the back by Oshie just before the punch, but you can bet it was dirty. Oshie flopped from the “punch” and could easily have earned an embellishment call from his dramatics. None the less, Oshie got what he wanted wanted however he baited Dougie. With one more game this season, Hamilton would have been wiser by serving his revenge “cold” next week.
I agree on both the game and Gardner.
The Caps are a bloody good team, it was time for them to win one in the series, and their goalie played lights out in the first period + at least 2 if not 3 posts, you win some, lose some, this game could’ve gone either way.
Gardner is the team’s weakest link. Trip who is the Gardner PR machine even said his play was “unfortunate” in this game (I’m a big fan of Trip’s, one of the smartest play-by-play analysts in the league and I like his little random escapades / chatter, but he is paid to promote the team so inevitably he will try to do just that).
Gardner has lost us a number of games and has yet to meaningfully contribute on the score sheet. In a pre game interview Shane even said straight out that our d core depth was much worse than last year while our strength down the middle has improved.
The big downgrade on D is Faulk / Gardner (I’d say steady Eddie is on par with CDH).
I think the next step has to be to try and sit him for a few games and see what happens. Fleury has played reasonably well, he almost got one last night with a bomb from the point and he is playing more aggressive than he has in the past. He’ll never be a top 2 or barely a top 4 defenseman but he is a pretty solid third pairing guy.
It’s important to take down the Lightning tomorrow to avoid a losing streak, if we manage at least 9 points out of the 14 for the home stand we’ll be ok, though I prefer 10.
So far we got 4 out of 6.
Tripp sang the same tunes about Skinner. He sucked too.
Lol, opinions remain somewhat divided on Skinner, I still claim he did more for his money than Gardner has done so far 😉 but I don’t claim to be right either.
I happily admit Skinner had massive flaws in his game, but he was a scoring machine, something the Canes needed badly at the time, fortunately today’s forward core is a heck of a lot more exciting.
Skinner, in the 2nd year of his huge dollar 8 year deal in Buffalo, is beginning to effect the Buffalo fans much has he did here. Currently on IR for a shoulder injury, Jeff was having a characteristically so-so season in Buffalo caused by a poor pay/production ratio. For me, there is poetic justice in the prospect that Jeff may likely get the record for playing on the highest number of teams with 9 year playoff droughts in the NHL.
I think Buffalo’s situation is more complex than that, their primary problems are lack of production and grit from their bottom 6 (a problem that the Canes of old are very familiar with, but not so much today).
The deal was crazy, I would not have advocated for the Canes offering Skinner anywhere close to 9 million/year (or 8, or even 7), but he’s one of many players that are not living up to their price tag.
Price at 10.5 mill/year is closer to the bottom of the goalie chart than the top
Ditto Bobrovski (9 mill I think)
Edmunton’s reliance on MCD and Dreizeitel has not exactly worked out (they kept the team going for 6 weeks or so but then started fading badly).
Eric Carlson with his monster deal is not the NHL’s top defense shark as he should be, given how much he gets paid.
We’ve seen it too at home with Eric Staal/Cam Ward’s combined 15.5 million (well over a quarter of the cap).
The Canes were unable to build a winning team when those two weren’t earning every cent of their top dollar every single night. They worked hard, (at least most of the time, though Eric Staal really seemed to stop caring about his physical conditioning in the last couple of years of his contract).
Of course the failed 7 mill investment in Semin pretty much doomed the Canes after the lockout season.
There are exceptions, primarily Pitsburgh’s deadly duo who have made the Penguins a 3-time cup contender with different support casts; a group of guys who mostly failed to perform anywhere else.
Chicago did a good job with their collection of superstars but I think they individually did not make as much money as the above mentioned, though I am too lazy to look it up right now.
Bottom-line, we agree, allocating 15 or 20% of your cap to a single player is a really big gamble, ditto 20 to 25% on two players, and I think your chances of that paying off are typically something like 10% or less.
Anyway, Skinner’s gone, he’s no longer our concern, other than we see Buffalo, and we typically have no problem collecting the two points when we do.
The roster is better now than when he was here, and that’s great.
Now onto Gardner. He is not being paid superstar money but he’s being paid to be a top 4 defenseman and he’s not, he’s barely a top 6, but he’s on a longterm contract. What can the Canes do to get more out of him, whatever has been done hasn’t worked and we’re halfway through the season. That is a problem for the here and now, one that needs to be solved somehow, because his mistakes are costing us games.