Hurricanes face difficult adjustment to life without Dougie Hamilton
When Dougie Hamilton went down Thursday night with his left leg twisted underneath him, the healthiest team in the NHL lost that distinction in about as damaging a way as possible.
One of the handful of players on the Carolina Hurricanes’ roster whose loss would be potentially catastrophic is now out indefinitely after surgery Friday to repair a broken leg, and suddenly the previously pressing concerns about whether Nino Niederreiter will ever get back on track or when Justin Williams will make his delayed debut — he’s got two games left before Mr. Game 7 becomes Mr. February — don’t seem quite as important.
A little perspective, that. Too much perspective.
Injury-riddled teams keep close track of how many man-games they have lost to injury, reminded as all the new faces shuffle in and out of the lineup. The team with the fewest injuries doesn’t even really pay much attention, rolling along blissfully oblivious until something like this happens and reality intrudes. Hamilton’s injury was essentially the same one Jordan Staal suffered five years ago, and losing Staal for the first three months submarined that entire season.
There’s no replacing Hamilton, who picked up where he left off last season as an offensive dynamo, not only creating chances for others but finishing them himself, and doing a far more credible job in his own end at the same time. Jaccob Slavin and Brett Pesce were already shouldering a heavy load as part of the defensive foundation with Hamilton; their nights aren’t going to get any shorter. Slavin played 25:23, third-most this season, in Friday’s 2-1 overtime loss to the Anaheim Ducks. Pesce played 25:34, second-most for him.
That’s the new normal for both in the post-Hamilton reality. The Hurricanes are hoping the way they played isn’t. Hamilton’s absence alone doesn’t excuse a dismal performance against a Western Conference bottom-feeder after Sebastian Aho staked the Hurricanes to the lead in the first four minutes.
“That’s a huge part of our team missing,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “But we have a lot of guys in there. I don’t think we were sharp. That was clearly evident.”
The Hurricanes were in the market for a top-four capable defenseman before Hamilton went down, but that quest was upgraded from “if possible” to “by all means necessary.” Unfortunately for them, everyone else in the NHL knows it. Whatever the prices they saw before were, they just went up. Fortunately, they have the salary-cap space to do it, and maybe even add a veteran depth guy as well. Ideally sooner rather than later.
Hamilton’s injury does pave the way for Slavin to get some belatedly deserved recognition at the All-Star Game at the end of the month, not the way Slavin would have wanted to get there but sometimes that’s the only way a defenseman like Slavin can. The All-Star selections are always slanted toward offense even on defense, which skews things toward the Sandis Ozolinsh end of the spectrum. The polished smoothness of Slavin’s two-way game doesn’t jump off the stat sheet the same way, which is how Noah Hanifin somehow ended up there two years ago instead, like a guy who got on the wrong bus and woke up in another state.
Hamilton qualified on both fronts, but this is good for Slavin, who the hockey community has been slow to recognize as the elite defenseman he is. His playoff performance moved the needle. This will too.
By next weekend, Slavin may have preferred the weekend off. Any recipe for replacing Hamilton will require these heavy minutes for Slavin and Pesce, maybe even Adrian Aucoin circa-2003 minutes if straits are dire enough. (Peter Laviolette, then the coach of the New York Islanders, routinely played Aucoin more than half the game, sometimes more than 40 minutes, even.)
The opportunity is there for Jake Gardiner to fill some of that gap, if he’s capable of doing so in a season that hasn’t gone the way Gardiner or the Hurricanes expected when they signed the free agent in September. This was the most ice time — almost 22 minutes — he has played in his 48 games with the Hurricanes, and he had the puck on his stick as the Hurricanes pressed at the end of regulation. He was also on the ice for Anaheim’s winner, although he was helpless after Andrei Svechnikov turned it over.
No team can lose a player the caliber of Hamilton and move on without a hitch. His absence wasn’t the reason the Hurricanes lost Friday, but they unquestionably missed his creativity and unpredictability. Someone has to expand their game to fill the void, whether that’s from within or without. Hamilton won’t be easy to replace, but the Hurricanes will have to do better than this.
This story was originally published January 17, 2020 at 10:53 PM.
