Canes-Caps series personal for Williams, and a chance to knock off the champs
With 140 games of NHL playoff experience and three Stanley Cup championship rings, Justin Williams has the proper gravitas to speak of such things.
The Carolina Hurricanes, after a 10-year absence, are back in the Stanley Cup playoffs. Williams, their captain, is doing all he can to prepare them for what’s to come in what he calls a “whole new animal” that is the NHL postseason.
In the Washington Capitals, the Canes are facing a team that won the Stanley Cup last year and has nearly everyone important -- minus Barry Trotz, the former head coach -- back for another run at the trophy that’s the hardest in sports to win.
The names are so familiar: Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom, Braden Holtby, Evgeny Kuznetsov, T.J. Oshie, John Carlson, Brooks Orpik, Tom WIlson. Their celebrations after winning the Cup were extensive and now the stuff of libation legend. Recently, they were being feted in the White House by President Trump. It’s a deep, tough team that won the Metropolitan Division with 104 points.
Many of those players were once Williams’ teammates with the Caps, for two years at least, and remain his friends.
“It makes it a little bit more interesting and obviously I guess a little bit more personal,” Williams said Monday. “I mean, I want to beat the tails off them. They had their success last year. But obviously it’s going to be an extremely tough series against a proven playoff-winning team.”
Few prognosticators expect a long series, much less the Canes winning. It’s all new for so many of the Canes players -- for Justin Faulk, Sebastian Aho, Jaccob Slavin and others who have not been in this position in the NHL.
Jordan Staal has been in 73 playoff games, winning a Cup with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2009. But his last playoff appearance was 2012, before his trade to Carolina.
It drops off from there. Nino Niederreiter was in 39 playoff games for the Minnesota Wild. Winger Teuvo Teravainen played 25 with the Chicago Blackhawks, winning a Cup in 2015, and defenseman Dougie Hamilton has 23 games of playoff experience with the Boston Bruins and Calgary Flames.
Consider that Ovechkin and the Caps were in 24 games last year.
“If you’re looking at the ‘Oh, we’re underdogs,’ obviously we’re underdogs,” Williams said. “We’re playing the defending Stanley Cup champions. But do we feel like we are? No. We’re going to work our tails off and see, as I said along, see how good we can be.
“At the end of the series, you either want to really, really make them earn it or you want to be able to push them out of if. By saying that, I mean at some point somebody’s going to give and say it’s too hard, and we’ve got to make sure its not us.”
The Canes (46-29-7) have been very good since the calendar flipped to 2019. Starting with a victory over the Philadelphia Flyers on New Year’s Eve, they went 31-12-2 in their last 45 games.
“It was a good stretch by us and we’re not done yet,” said Aho, who led the Canes with 30 goals.
The Canes did not beat the Caps this season. In four games they managed one point, that in a shootout loss to Washington on Dec. 14 at PNC Arena. Playing consecutive games in March, home and home, the Caps won 4-1 and 3-2 -- competitive games but Washington victories.
“They’re a veteran team and the games that we lost this year were tight checking games that they found a way to win, which is what good teams do,” Williams said. “We can learn from that. We can look at those and say we were right there, which we were. And playoff time is a whole new animal.”
The Canes were in some stressful games the past month and especially in the past few weeks as they battled the Columbus Blue Jackets and Montreal Canadiens for playoff spots. Williams called them “do-or-die” games and the Canes and Blue Jackets survived in the end, leaving the Canadiens the disappointed team left out.
But the Caps have been in big pressure games in the playoffs. Or as Canes coach Rod Brind’Amour put it Monday, “They’re comfortable being uncomfortable.”
There are ebbs and flows in every playoff series. Brind’Amour said the first-round games often are the best.
“Playoffs are always physical and the first round is the most physical, by a mile,” he said. “Everybody’s fresh and eager to go and I think the toll weighs on you later. We know what we’re getting into. You’ve got to be able to grind and we’ve done that all year.”
And if things do turn chippy, as playoff games can tend to be?
“We’re a tough team and we don’t back down from anybody,” Williams said.
Canes’ career playoff experience
Justin Williams 140 games, Jordan Staal 73, Nino Niederreiter 39, Teuvo Teravainen 25, Dougie Hamilton 23, Calvin de Haan 16, Trevor van Riemsdyk 15, Micheal Ferland 13, Petr Mrazek 11, Curtis McElhinney 2, Greg McKegg 1.
This story was originally published April 9, 2019 at 9:50 AM.
