The Carolina Hurricanes — and their Lenovo sellout streak — keep gathering momentum
Multiple Waldos sat along the glass, not far from Ricky Bobby. The Dumb and Dumber guys didn’t look out of place. Patrick Star left Bikini Bottom to spend the night over Rod Brind’Amour’s shoulder. There was a Seth Jarvis on the ice and a mini-Seth Jarvis in a cutoff Harvard T-shirt who joined his doppelganger on the ice afterward.
And the usual countless hundreds of hockey sweaters, if those count.
In or out of costume, it was a full house at the Lenovo Center on Thursday to see the Carolina Hurricanes beat up on the Boston Boo-ins instead of tricking and/or treating. The Hurricanes fed the Bruins into an 8-2 wood-chipper in front of their 71st straight sellout, even on one of the toughest nights to sell tickets on the calendar.
Just how hard? The lowest recorded attendance in this building came on Halloween night against the Tampa Bay Lightning on Oct. 31, 2000. Officially, the announced crowd was 7,016. Unofficially, there was maybe a quarter of that actually present in the building. The Entertainment and Sports Arena dressed up as the Greensboro Coliseum, minus the curtains in the upper deck.
At that point, not so far removed from the two disastrous years in Greensboro, it was fair to wonder if the NHL was actually going to work here. By that spring it was apparent that it definitely could, a year later it was clear that it certainly would, and here we are now.
Twenty-four years and three arena names later — from the ESA to the RBC Center to PNC Arena to Lenovo — it’s remarkable how far the Hurricanes have come. The Hurricanes’ ongoing sellout streak, dating to February 2023, includes more capacity crowds than the Hurricanes had in the regular season from 1999-2008 combined.
A lot of water has gone under that particular bridge, but even after the Stanley Cup, even after the Dark Times finally came to an end, sellouts were still the exception rather than the rule they have become. There’s a lot that goes into that: Winning, to be sure, but also a generation of fans who grew up with the team here, a tailwind that took years to gather.
But the momentum has been building for a while, and it’s there now like never before, every single home game since the one after the outdoor game at Carter-Finley Stadium — an understandable blip given the anticipation and celebration that surrounded that unforgettable event. Who didn’t need a break after that?
So even Halloween was no match for the excitement generated by one of the best road trips in franchise history, the Hurricanes’ 5-1-0 cross-continent swing, although certainly a popular opponent among transplants didn’t hurt either.
They got a good one, an old-fashioned rout after surmounting two Boston two-man advantages in the first period, the second coming when Rod Brind’Amour got called for unsportsmanlike conduct with the puck in play and the Hurricanes already short-handed. Can you imagine what he must have said to get that call at that time? And is he still on double secret probation four years after racking up $50,000 in NHL fines?
Nevertheless, the Hurricanes killed off the rest of the second five-on-three — Brad Marchand scored on the first to make it 1-1 after Jack Roslovic’s opener — and hung three more goals on the Bruins before the period was out, in the span of 52 seconds, the fastest triple in the NHL so far this season.
Andrei Svechnikov scored twice to double his total on the year ... and he’s still chasing both Martin Necas and Roslovic on the year after Necas scored his fifth and Roslovic his fifth and sixth.
That made it six wins in a row and 71 sellouts in a row, two phenomena that are not entirely unrelated as the Hurricanes keep rolling right along.
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This story was originally published October 31, 2024 at 9:56 PM with the headline "The Carolina Hurricanes — and their Lenovo sellout streak — keep gathering momentum."
