Hurricanes’ failure to score has become existential crisis as frustration runneth over
There’s no better way to capture the midseason malaise of an NHL team than “losing at home to Arizona on a Wednesday night,” a phrase that captures a dismal result amid uninspiring circumstances. That’s the Carolina Hurricanes right now, stumbling into the holidays like … everyone else is, really.
Wednesday was grim. A completely dominant but fruitless first period ended with the Hurricanes somehow down 1-0, and whatever good they had done was wiped out by their own frustration in what ended up a 4-0 loss. It’s been a long time since the Hurricanes were booed, good and truly booed, at home.
The frustration from failing to score, night after night, is clearly bleeding over into other areas, like Brent Burns’ inexplicable backhanded clearing attempt that led to the second goal, and Jordan Staal getting outfought in the high slot for the third. Those things don’t happen when the Hurricanes are rolling.
In the big picture, it’s better for the Hurricanes to muddle through this kind of existential crisis in November than in March, which they did last year and never quite recovered. There’s a lot going on here, from a power play that alternates between snakebit and uninspired to erratic goaltending — although not Wednesday, when Antti Raanta was a late scratch and Pyotr Kotchetov was not the problem — to the Hurricanes’ continuing ascension on the NHL ziggurat.
You know which teams occasionally have trouble on a Monday night in Winnipeg? Good ones. During the Long Dark Years, that was how the Hurricanes won most of their games, by catching good teams on off nights, back when the sight of a Carolina jersey didn’t exactly stir emotions in the opposition. But now everyone wants to measure themselves against the Hurricanes, which means you always have to be ready to be measured — by your opponents, by your own fans.
There is probably, subconsciously, a little bit of pacing going on. When you expect to play 100-something games, it’s hard to get too excited about the 20th, especially against the Jets or Coyotes. Of course, that’s no excuse. It shouldn’t happen. But it happens. It surely does.
“We were pretty flat,” Staal said. “At some point we’ve got to have some emotion and get going and start pushing each other. Whether that’s getting angry, I don’t know, but something’s got to change and get some momentum and some jump in our game.”
That’s also why there’s not really reason for genuine concern, as disconcerting and disappointing as the Hurricanes may be to watch right now. There was a time when an 0-for-21 skid on the power play could be the feather that would knock them out of playoff contention before Thanksgiving. Now, it’s a bump in the road. This team’s going to be fine, eventually.
It’s difficult to reconcile, in this moment, the chances the Hurricanes are creating on a nightly basis with the fact they’ve scored a paltry 18 goals in the past nine games — and seven of those came in one game and another three with Kotchetkov on the bench for an extra skater Monday. It’s not good enough.
But an NHL-worst shooting percentage of 7.7 percent is so below par for this group, it’s surely unsustainable in the long term. Even last spring in the playoffs, when goals were so hard to come by, they were better than this. Any regression to the mean is going to produce what will seem like spectacular results.
The fundamentals are intact, despite this lull in results. The talent is still there. The chances are still there. As Roy Williams would say if he were a hockey fan, “Guys, everything looks better when the puck goes in the net.”
“That’s pretty much what’s happened a lot this year in our losses,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “We’ve played pretty well in stretches and we don’t get anything out of it. And then the other team’s going to have their push too. That’s just part of it. We’ve got to find a way to cash in when we have empty nets. It’s got to go in. It’s too hard to score in this league.”
And while no one man is irreplaceable, Teuvo Teravainen’s absence hurts, especially on the power play, where his unpredictability is sorely missed given the Hurricanes’ tendency to become stagnant and passive after failing to convert their first couple chances. If we know anything about Andrei Svechnikov, it’s that he excels at scoring into empty nets, so to see him miss one with a chance to end the man-advantage drought was not only jarring but a reminder of how out of character all of this really is.
Other prescriptions don’t make sense. Get more bodies in front? The Hurricanes had so much traffic in front of Karel Vejmelka they blocked some of their own shots and overskated big rebounds. Stefan Noesen even tried fighting to light a spark, like it’s 1994 or something, to no avail.
This is hard for Hurricanes fans to endure, still scarred by the memory of teams in the not too distant past that piled up shots and never had the talent to genuinely compete, but this is a different group. It has proven over the past four seasons that it is more than capable of getting to the starting line of the second season that matters.
“We know how good we are as a team,” Svechnikov said. “We’ve just got to find our game.”
This too shall pass. But that doesn’t make it any easier to watch right now.
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This story was originally published November 23, 2022 at 10:50 PM with the headline "Hurricanes’ failure to score has become existential crisis as frustration runneth over."
