Although the Hurricanes’ nine days off ended, some of the team still looked like they were enjoying their vacations as they effortlessly trudged along through the first 20 minutes of hockey putting themselves in a 2-0 hole because of it.
And it was due to this effort, or lack-there-of, that had head coach Rod Brind’Amour livid post-game.
“It’s terrible,” Brind’Amour said. “It’s terrible. It’s not acceptable to come out and play like that for really two and a half periods. [The Golden Knights] were good, I give them a ton of credit. They played the way they had to. Played desperate. Played fast. Played how we said they were going to and we weren’t ready to match that. That’s what you get. We got what we deserved.”
While the Hurricanes managed to surmount a comeback, tying the game in the fleeting minutes of regulation, it was all for naught as the team surrendered the game-winning goal only a minute later.
“We tried to get going, but it took some time,” said Canes forward Teuvo Teravainen. “Not very happy about the game. It was nice we made it a game, but it doesn’t matter because we lost. It really doesn’t matter if we lose with four goals or one; it’s still a loss.”
And it was a heartbreaking one at that for the majority of the 18,150 in attendance as the Carolina Hurricanes fell 4-3 to the Vegas Golden Knights at PNC Arena Friday night.
The game started off poorly for Carolina as the first of the Golden Knights’ goals came only 3:52 into the game on a blown coverage, as Reilly Smith managed to cycle into the slot unchecked and due to that he had enough time to wait and find Paul Stastny for a backdoor tap-in.
The second goal came a bit later off the stick of Jonathan Marchessault, left wide-open due to a poor line change by the Hurricanes. He skated down to the circle and beat Carolina netminder Petr Mrazek short-side with a wrister. A shot that needed to be saved.
Nothing went the Canes’ way and they were still to be considered lucky to escape the first only down by two.
When asked post-game why the team started so poorly, assistant captain Jordan Martinook was at a loss for the right words.
“I don’t know, I wish I had why… I don’t know,” Martinook said. “I think we kind of… You overthink sometimes or you just try and maybe you want to do it right and sometimes your mind just… I don’t know. I’m saying I don’t know a lot because I don’t know. I wish I had something to tell you.”
In the second, the Canes managed to get on the scoreboard as Teravainen nearly did it all himself. On the power play, the Finnish winger stole the puck off the Vegas forecheck and took it all the way up the ice through all three zones. After leaving it off, he then managed to find the eventual rebound loose outside of the crease and cashed it in to cut the deficit.
The game went back and forth as the second expired and it ramped back up in the third period as the Hurricanes started to take more risks with the clock ticking and down by one.
However, this came back to bite them.
Joel Edmundson committed to a pinch and wound up on the wrong side of a 3-on-1 rush that even All-Star defenseman Jaccob Slavin could do nothing about. The rush led to Vegas blueliner Nate Schmidt alone in the slot, where he roofed it over Mrazek.
At that point it seemed completely over, but 16 seconds later, none other than Brock McGinn managed to find top-corner to basically bring the entire sequence back to square one.
With time expiring, Carolina found itself the warm recipient of a hooking call as Andrei Svechnikov barreled through the Vegas defense. Only eight seconds into the power play, the Hurricanes struck with Sebastian Aho tipping home a Slavin point shot.
It seemed as if the Hurricanes had come back. It seemed as though the team had been able to wake up just in time and secure a much needed point in the suffocatingly close Metropolitan race. But it wasn’t so.
It was complete and utter bad luck, but who would it be more fitting to find it than against the professional hockey team from Las Vegas.
The Hurricanes were buzzing after the tying goal and the building was electric. With a few shot attempts going wide, the Canes were coming closer and closer to looking like the eventual winners. Then the puck found its way to the blueline where Edmundson wound up for a slapshot only for his stick to snap in two.
On the ensuing rush, Aho was forced to take a hooking call and on that ensuing power play, Vegas scored in only six seconds to take back the lead.
“If you watch however many games there are a year, I bet you it only happens once,” said Martinook on the play.
It’s true that you may never see that scenario again, but the Canes needed a big kill there and Brind’Amour felt that his team may have been screwed by more than just luck on the ensuing faceoff after the Aho call..
“I didn’t like Jordo [Staal] getting kicked out of [the faceoff]. If you look back at it, it was actually the other guy that should have been kicked out. Jordo’s stick was down and the other guy encroached and he reacted. So that was a tough one, especially at that time of the game. You usually let them play it out a little bit.”
There is no telling if the Canes would have killed the entirety of that penalty or the rest of that period without conceding a goal, but there is no denying that if Staal had been allowed to stay in the faceoff dot, the game had a much greater chance of having gone differently.
But, as Brind’Amour pointed out, they got what they deserved. The team is struggling to start on time and with more than a few goal-scorers drying up, you can’t expect to, and really shouldn’t, win like that.
“We prepared like we knew we had to, but we were slow,” Brind’Amour said. “Everything was slow. They were fast and that’s what it looks like when it goes that way. There was just a lot of no-shows tonight and that was the problem. We aren’t good enough to have one or two guys no-show and we had probably half a dozen.”
The issue of no-shows is one fairly new to the Brind’Amour regime this year in particular. The team last year built its whole identity on the basis of them showing up everyday and outworking their opponents and it seems to be this lack of effort that has crept into the locker room quite a few times this season.
The sentiment was also repeated by a few players.
Teravainen pointed out in his post-game interview that “Everybody has to make sure they are ready to play,” and Martinook mentioned that, “Everyone in here needs to know that we need to be that team,” when talking about desperation and outworking opponents.
The Hurricanes have a rather quick turnaround to address these issues as the team returns to PNC against the Vancouver Canucks, another desperate team in a extremely tight division, Sunday at 2 p.m.
Hurricanes goal tender Petr Mrazek looks on as the Golden Knights celebrate their first goal in the first period on Friday, Jan. 31, 2020 at PNC Arena. Mrazek let in four goals on 37 shots. The third period was high scoreing with two goals coming from each team during the 4-3 Canes loss.
