For Hurricanes, bouncing back from quadruple OT loss will be as much mental as physical
A half-eaten bowl of chicken and rice sat in Frederik Andersen’s empty locker, sustenance consumed during the sixth intermission. A cart full of more of those bowls, plus fresh fruit and yogurt, sat outside the door to the Carolina Hurricanes’ locker room, prepared for a seventh intermission that wouldn’t come.
Inside, players limped and staggered through the locker room like they had awoken from a long slumber, bags of ice attached to all kinds of body parts — ankles, knees, hip flexors. Jesper Fast barely pedaled an exercise bike, sullenly.
It may not be a broken group, after losing the sixth-longest game in NHL history, but it is certainly a battered one.
To play that long, into the darkening shadow of a seventh overtime, and come away with nothing leaves a challenge that is as much mental as it is physical. You can’t win a series in Game 1, but you can certainly lose it, especially when that game drags on until almost 2 a.m.
“We lost the first one, but you’ve got to just sleep on it and come back the next day and start fresh,” Hurricanes forward Martin Necas said, even if the next day was already here.
That is the crossroads where the Hurricanes now find themselves, 3-2 losers to the Florida Panthers in a conference-final opener that went on and on and on and on, until the least likely of culprits made the fatal mistake. Jaccob Slavin turned it over in the neutral zone. First Brent Burns and then Slavin failed to get the puck out. And Matthew Tkachuk, who had barely done a thing all night, came swooping off the boards to beat the phenomenal Andersen after 139 minutes and 47 seconds of hockey.
Less than a minute earlier, Sebastian Aho had a wide-open look at the post but couldn’t elevate the puck over Sergei Bobrovsky’s right pad. These are the fine margins by which games and series and championships are won and lost — the Panthers even had a would-be winner disallowed for goaltender interference in the first overtime, which in retrospect would have been merciful — and no one knows that better than Rod Brind’Amour, who was trailing the decisive play in what had until Thursday-slash-Friday been the longest game in franchise history.
Igor Larionov beat Bates Battaglia to the net to score late in the third overtime to give the Detroit Red Wings a 2-1 lead in the 2002 Stanley Cup finals, and that was that. All of their very old legs were suddenly rejuvenated; the momentum the Hurricanes brought home with them from Detroit after winning the opener there in overtime evaporated. That game was the series, and not only in hindsight. Everyone knew it at the time.
Paul Maurice was on the losing side of that one, and the winning side Friday morning, and for a brief period of time in the third overtime was the coach for the longest games in both teams’ history. There was a lot of that going on as the clock kept ticking, digging deeper and deeper into the NHL record book, and again when it ended.
The Hurricanes’ seven-game overtime winning streak came to an end. They lost an OT playoff game at home for the first time since 2009. They fell to 1-6 all time in multiple-OT games, with three of those losses in this building, and a fourth in Greensboro. Interestingly enough, of those five previous series — they lost a pair to Nashville in 2021 — they’ve ended up winning the past two, despite the lengthy losses. But that hasn’t been the case in NHL history. Of the five games that went longer than this one, the winning team won all five series.
So it’s a long climb back from this for the Hurricanes after their first overtime playoff loss at home since 2009, and in a series that goes every other night, as relentlessly as this game wore on into the night, playing from Thursday into Friday leaves precious little time to regroup after being “on the shitty side of it,” as Hurricanes captain Jordan Staal said.
At some point in these intervening 40 hours, the Hurricanes will have to stand up straight, shake off the bruises, flush the lactic acid and clear their minds of the feeling that they lost twice in one night. It only counts once in the series, as they’re all quick to say, but there’s no guarantee that’s the truth. They still have to make it so.
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This story was originally published May 19, 2023 at 3:01 AM with the headline "For Hurricanes, bouncing back from quadruple OT loss will be as much mental as physical."
