If it weren’t for bad bounces, Hurricanes wouldn’t have had any at all in Game 5 loss
The nightly task of winding up the warning siren before the third period on Tuesday fell to N.C. State football players Isaiah Moore and Christopher Dunn, and Moore grabbed the handle with his right hand and gave it a good crank, at least until the handle got stuck. He worked it loose, but it just spun. Moore tried to give it a good effort, but produced only silence.
The siren breaking like that was exactly the kind of thing that happened to the Carolina Hurricanes in Game 5, when the game’s most important goal was scored off Sebastian Aho’s face, and the Hurricanes gave it a good effort to no avail.
“The guy was probably not aiming for my face, either,” Aho said. “But that’s hockey. It happens.”
There’s bad luck, which happens, and bad turnovers, which cannot.
The combination of the two doomed the Hurricanes to a 3-2 loss and a return trip to New York, where they’ll once again share a casino hotel with a whole bunch of other people hoping their luck changes, but very few who turned the puck over at crucial moments to prolong a playoff series against the New York Islanders that could and probably should have ended Tuesday night.
The Hurricanes have been uncharacteristically loose with the puck at all the wrong times in this series, overcoming Brady Skjei’s Game 2 turnover, but not Derek Stepan’s in Game 3 or two on Tuesday. The first gave the Islanders their first first-period lead in a playoff game in 25 games — the 1928-35 Montreal Maroons’ record is safe! — and the second gave the Islanders a two-goal lead just when the Hurricanes had overcome one impossibly bad break to get back into the game.
Brent Burns and Jaccob Slavin failing to get the puck out, which gifted Pierre Engvall the Islanders’ opener, happens about once a season. Martin Necas getting his pocket picked, a play Mat Barzal started and finished to make it 3-1, slightly more often but not nearly as much this season as in the past, and not usually on four-on-four when Necas is typically at his best.
“Tough goals,” Necas said. “Especially the third one, you know. My bad. Made a turnover there. Yeah. That was a big one for them. Try to learn from that and there’s nothing else to do than just get ready for the next game. I’ll be ready.”
Either way, neither goal allowed was as incomprehensible as the Islanders’ second, when Aho took a shot in the jaw and crumpled to the ice as the puck fell perfectly for Brock Nelson at the post, or the Hurricanes’ opener that didn’t count, Stefan Noesen’s power-play goal coming off the board when Noesen himself was offsides entering the zone a full 22 seconds earlier.
It’s a dumb rule to review a missed call that happened eons earlier in the context of a power play, but everyone knows the rule, and there was still a lot of hockey left at that point. Aho demonstrated that, missing 5½ minutes of game time before pulling the Hurricanes within a goal in the third with a busted lip, flipping a Seth Jarvis feed over Ilya Sorokin’s glove.
There were countless chances after that, especially with Antti Raanta pulled for an extra attacker, but the Hurricanes came up a bounce short. They played well enough to close this thing out, outshooting the Islanders 36-22 and outchancing them by an even wider margin, and instead two mistakes and a mandibular deflection ended up in the back of their net and they’ve got two days to stew over what didn’t go their way before Game 6 on Friday.
“Lots of good in this game,” Aho said. “Obviously a couple unfortunate breaks. The first power-play goal overturned. A couple tough breaks on their goals. It’s supposed to be hard this time of year. We were ready for a long series. It’s no big deal. Just go back to Long Island and try to do what we did another night there.”
At least their road record won’t be a topic of discussion heading into Friday; the Hurricanes dispensed with that on Sunday but squandered a chance for a shorter series on Tuesday. Some of that was their fault. But not all of it.
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This story was originally published April 25, 2023 at 10:51 PM with the headline "If it weren’t for bad bounces, Hurricanes wouldn’t have had any at all in Game 5 loss."
