With the core group at hand, Carolina can no longer sell the new company, writes Urheilu’s NHL editor Tommi Seppälä.
Tommi Seppälä NHL reporter
Carolina pilot by Rod Brind’Amour performance in front of the media a year ago was deafening to watch. Florida had just ended Carolina’s season in the third round of the NHL playoffs in four straight games, but the result did not suit the Canadian hockey icon. Brind’Amour went on about how Carolina didn’t really lose four games, but deserved more and so on.
This is what the coach, whose team scored one and a half goals per match, spoke. A coach whose team managed to win twice in fourteen attempts.
And this is how the coach spoke, whose team was publicly seeking a moral victory no matter how many spring in a row. A year earlier, it had again been overwhelmingly victorious in the shooting stats against the New York Rangers, but had a miserable 1.86 hits per game in seven games and lost. Overwhelmingly, there were two successes in eighteen attempts.
1.8 goals against Tampa in spring 2021 and 2/14 on the power play.
And no matter what, the team built the same story this spring as well. A terrible neck (+67) in shooting attempts, but for example the power play was successful with 21 attempts twice.
This is what Carolina has been all the years of Brind’Amour (2018- ). A good regular season team that maintains shocking volume with their shooting. Literally everything is thrown at the goal. During the current coaching season, Carolina has won field goal attempts in the regular season by a margin of more than 5,500. The difference to the margin of the second coming (Calgary) is an incredible 2500!
After all these years, it’s okay to ask if at some point it would have been worthwhile to invest in quality instead of quantity.
In tight spots, Carolina has shown year after year to be a team that does not have enough talent to score – or if this time there was even a little, it will find ways to lose. When the season has been on the ropes in the previous five years, Carolina has made nine power hits in 80 power plays. The performance is below all criticism considering the quality of the team.
In the completed series, the Rangers scored one goal under the power during Carolina’s power plays and built a large number of power attacks.
Shoes for everyone?
Especially in the case of Toronto, there has been a lot of talk about how the club’s management, coaching and the team’s key players have been unable to push the club to a new level for a long time. After the latest failure, the head coach Sheldon Keefe was relieved of his duties. The general consensus is that after all, Toronto cannot show up in the fall with the same team to try for a different result.
Carolina has now reached Toronto’s level when it comes to standing still, despite winning more playoff series over the years.
Compared to previous years, this spring’s Carolina even seemed confusingly lifeless. On the other hand, it’s no wonder that after endless banging one’s head against the wall, faith began to run out. It exudes a team. Carolina dominated the second and third games of the series at hand at times to their liking, but it’s bad to shoot big bangs with a teddy bear gun.
And it is certain that there will again be surprising comments about how the end result does not correspond to what happened on the field and how small the margins are. Reaching its biggest and most beautiful would be just behind a small bounce.
No and no.
With a bit of hesitation, you could say that after the latest stomach-churning, the theme must be a shoe for everyone. Brind’Amour’s further contract negotiations must also be put on ice in this case. It’s coaching time. Is Teuvo Teräväinen time. Is Andrei Svetshnikov and by Martin Necas time. The team must be shaken so that the helmet shakes. The fact that the old pea soup is being reheated into the new season is a shocking lie to both the club itself and the public.
It’s really hard to see how the Carolina team talks itself out of this loss.
Carolina is a team of teddy guns and the superior moral NHL dynasty of recent years, but this team has nothing to do with winning properly. The Hurricanes have played 37 playoff games in the past three years, in which Seth Jarvis and Sebastian Aho have scored 13 hits – these numbers are definitely not world-class either, but the next ones will only come in eight.
But the factory’s guarantee is that this time too “the series was tight and the margins small” and “we dominated the game and would have earned more”.