The Carolina Hurricanes dropped their first game of the preseason Wednesday night at PNC Arena. In what was a sloppy game for both teams, an obvious early preseason contest, Carolina fell 4-3 to the visiting Tampa Bay Lightning.
The Canes, who fall to 2-1-0 in the exhibition schedule, got goals from forwards Lucas Wallmark and Derek Ryan, and goalies Cam Ward and Jeremy Smith combined to stop 21 of 25 shots.
“I thought we got flat there for a while,” head coach Bill Peters said. “I thought we came out the first ten minutes of the game and the game was going and it had some good tempo to it, and then it got flat. Once they made it 3-1, I thought we started to play again, and then I didn’t think they got much. But there was a stretch there where we weren’t very good as a group.”
The Bolts struck first about seven minutes in, as forward Adam Erne finished on a wide-open chance in the slot, beating Ward stick side to make it 1-0.
With the Canes on a power play about halfway through the first, forward Jordan Staal took a stick to the face and headed to the locker room, but returned to the bench shortly.
At the tail end of the resulting five-on-three, Wallmark finished a feed in the dead slot from forward Elias Lindholm to tie the game at one.
Things got chippy early in the middle frame as Ryan got crunched along the boards by Tampa forward Anthony Cirelli. Canes blueliner Haydn Fleury stepped in to fight Cirelli and stick up for his teammate, earning a 10-minute misconduct for his troubles.
“You don’t really think too much; you kind of just react”, Fleury said. “Your adrenaline gets going. I didn’t think it was a great hit by any means, so I’m just standing up for [Ryan].”
Tampa grabbed a 3-1 lead less than five minutes into the second period, getting markers from forward Tye McGinn and defenseman Mikhail Sergachev. Canes forward Gregory Hoffman found open ice for a breakaway just before Sergachev’s goal, but Budaj came up with the stop to essentially give the Bolts a two-goal swing.
“[We were] definitely a little sloppy,” defenseman Jaccob Slavin said. “We definitely had some moments where the puck was bouncing on us and just not making crisp passes.”
Carolina cut the lead in half about halfway through the middle frame, as forward Derek Ryan cashed in a loose puck off a net-mouth scramble to make it 3-2.
Tampa nearly regained a two-goal lead with about five minutes left in the second, but Ward made a sharp stop on Bolts forward JT Brown in the slot to keep it at 3-2.
Bolts forward Boris Katchouk put his team up by two just after a Tampa power play expired with about eight minutes left in the third to make it 4-2.
Canes forward Sebastian Aho brought the team within one on a late power play with Smith on the bench, burying a shot from the right circle to make it 4-3. The team could not find the equalizer, however, and came up just short in its preseason home opener.
The game concluded a stretch of three games in three nights for Carolina, in which the team got a lot of useful observations to make individual evaluations and decisions about its group and trimming the roster.
“There’s things that we learned here tonight,” Peters said. “There’s some good things; there’s some things that definitely need to be cleaned up. There’s no question about that. But I thought individually, some guys had good nights.”
The Canes will get two days off, in which a large round of roster cuts is likely, before heading to DC to take on the Washington Capitals Saturday night.
