RALEIGH - A season not off to the most attractive of starts for the Carolina Hurricanes turned ugly Sunday when a practice designed to punish turned violent.

Kevyn Adams suffered a cut over his left eye in a fight with teammate Bret Hedican midway through an hour-long skating session as the tension of a winless season overflowed on the RecZone ice.

On what had been a scheduled off day, the Hurricanes went through an unscheduled rough day as Hurricanes coach Peter Laviolette attempted to take corrective action after only three games to prevent things from getting worse in the next 79.

"We have to start playing the game the right way," Laviolette said. "The biggest thing that I can take from exhibition season and the first three games of the year is that we're not paying a price to be successful. If we're not going to do it in games, we have to do it in practice."

Fifty minutes in, frustration erupted into anger as Adams and Hedican exchanged first angry words and then blows during a drill. Even the process of breaking up the fight became contentious. Hedican declined to comment, while Adams was unavailable as he received medical attention for the cut.

"I think there's a little bit of frustration," Hurricanes defenseman Glen Wesley said. "A lot of it is, we have to be better as a group and I think we have high expectations for each other. We're as disappointed as anybody. When you go through practices like that, tempers are going to flare.

"It's competitiveness, it's wanting to win, it's all those things that add up. I don't think anybody likes where we are right now and that boiled over today."

The Hurricanes may not have seen the fight coming, but they knew whatever happened Sunday wasn't going to be pleasant. When Laviolette's postgame comments Saturday included the phrase "we're kidding ourselves," the Hurricanes didn't need a magnifying glass to read between the lines.

It couldn't have been any clearer if the ice had been painted black Sunday: Good morning. This is your wake-up call for the season.

"The practice was for a purpose," Laviolette said. "The drills were based on things that we're doing through the course of a game. The accountability comes in the skating -- the poor discipline, the penalties, the lack of effort. We're going to skate and we're going to work. The bottom line is, we're going to work."

The Canes came out firing in the first period of Wednesday's 3-2 shootout loss to the Buffalo Sabres, but fired blanks in Friday's 4-0 loss to the New Jersey Devils and were out of ammunition in the third period of Saturday's 5-2 loss to the Washington Capitals.

After four sloppy preseason games, Laviolette put the Canes through a rough-and-tumble wringer at the Caniac Carnival that provoked a resurgent win over the Capitals in the final preseason game and offered some reassurance that the Canes were on the right track.

That hasn't been the case since, with Laviolette visibly and vocally unhappy and frustrated with both the process and the results. The Hurricanes have four days to figure it out before they travel south to take on the Florida Panthers on Wednesday.

"Obviously, we didn't get the job done last night," Hurricanes forward Eric Staal said. "Coming in this morning we wanted to work hard and go out there and battle. We practiced hard today and we'll be ready for the next game."

There was nothing like this last season, when even the Hurricanes' brief stumbles in December and March seemed mere hiccups when compared to their dominance otherwise.

Sunday's so-called "bag skate," as it's known in hockey parlance, now takes a place in recent Hurricanes history with the December 2001 practice behind closed doors at the RecZone that helped turn the Canes' season around on their way to the Stanley Cup finals and the one in Los Angeles in February 2003 that helped that season spiral out of control when Craig MacDonald collapsed and Jeff O'Neill left the ice screaming curses at then-coach Paul Maurice.

So if history is any indication, a season only five days old has nonetheless reached a precipice of sorts. The Canes will be back at work this morning on their 2-for-19 power play, while Rod Brind'Amour now has the duty as captain of rebuilding a fractured dressing room.

"I have to try to mend some fences here, but this is ordinary stuff," Brind'Amour said. "This isn't that big a deal. The most important thing is that guys care about what we're doing and why we're out here this early in the season."