Turns out, Martin Necas is who the Carolina Hurricanes thought he was all along
The least surprising thing about Martin Necas’ start to the season is that it’s happening. This was always in him. He was always capable of it..
To see the Carolina Hurricanes’ leading scorer pot the go-ahead goal in the final minute of Tuesday night’s win over the Philadelphia Flyers, yet again delivering in the biggest moment, moving into the top six in NHL scoring with 20 points in 11 games, had the ring of the inevitable to it.
It’s what Necas has become. It’s what he always could be.
“Marty Necas kind of took over there at the end,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said after the 6-4 win. “Sometimes you’ve got to win that way.”
Over the past few up-and-down seasons, and during the Hurricanes’ six-year quest to win a third playoff round, Necas has gone through some uncomfortable contract negotiations and taken a lot of heat for not playing like this, because of his obvious and apparent ability. His ability to skate with the puck is elite, his playmaking precise, his shot increasingly dangerous.
Now that he’s gotten to this level, there’s no reason why he can’t stay there. And do the Hurricanes ever need him to keep going like this.
There was one hole the Hurricanes didn’t fill in the offseason with a like-for-like equivalent, and that was the Michael Bunting/Jake Guentzel piece up front. The only way to replace that production was to, borrowing a concept, recreate it in the aggregate. That demanded increased contributions from not only Necas but Andrei Svechnikov and Jesperi Kotkaniemi and others.
The question was never whether he could do that. It was just whether Necas — who landed on the wing after being drafted in the top 12 to be a top-six center, whose play sometimes lacked directness — would.
Necas has won at every level short of the NHL, so perhaps winning a World Championship with Czechia this summer — on a team full of NHL players, in Prague no less — galvanized something inside him and launched Necas into fully emerging as the player he was always capable of becoming. He’s never lacked confidence, especially in overtime when the ice opens up at three-on-three, so perhaps these are merely the fruits of age and hard-won experience, the lingering postseason frustrations finally boiling over.
Either way, there are several reasons why the Hurricanes are off to a 9-2-0 start going into Thursday’s game against the Pittsburgh Penguins despite all the roster turnover, and Necas is the biggest of all of them, not only on the scoreboard but by making opponents choose between sending their best defenders up against the Sebastian Aho line or the second trio of Kotkaniemi, Necas and, currently, Eric Robinson. Pick your poison.
This torrid pace may not last. Necas’ career shooting percentage, converting on more than a quarter of his shots on goal, is far higher than anything we’ve seen in his career, the best it has been since 2019. That’s likely to regress at some point, but even if his goal-scoring pace slows slightly, there’s no reason to expect his production to drop precipitously. This isn’t magic, or a statistical artifact of a small sample. It’s a player utilizing skills and talent that were there all along, but now to their greatest effectiveness.
So as impressive as his performance has been, it’s merely a welcome development, not a shock. Everyone — scouts, executives, coaches, teammates, opponents, fans, Necas himself — knew Necas had this in him. For the Hurricanes, who started the season amid a cloud of uncertainty that has all but dispersed, the timing could only be better if it came at the end of the season rather than the beginning. Time will tell.
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This story was originally published November 6, 2024 at 11:35 AM with the headline "Turns out, Martin Necas is who the Carolina Hurricanes thought he was all along."
