Rod Brind’Amour wouldn’t say the word, but he didn’t have to: the Hurricanes quit
If only the Carolina Hurricanes had worked as hard and shown the same willingness to dig deep into their souls that Rod Brind’Amour did to avoid saying the word “quit” after Monday’s Game 4 debacle.
The Hurricanes coach danced around that word the way the Hurricanes danced out of hits against the Boston Bruins on Monday, but it’s the only word to describe how the Hurricanes turned a two-goal lead into a 4-3 loss during a third period that was as embarrassing for their lack of commitment as it was the score.
It left Brind’Amour searching back fruitlessly for any comparison not only to earlier in this series, not only to last year’s playoff run, but his entire tenure in charge of the Hurricanes dating back to the summer of 2018.
“It’s been mostly good for a year-and-a-half, two years with the effort and the way they play,” Brind’Amour said. “We’ve got to take the bad on this one.”
The way the Hurricanes played in the third, soft and tentative and weak and scared despite being a mere 20 minutes away from evening a series they now trail 3-1, wasn’t like anything he or anyone else had known from his teams. (As a head coach, at least; this was straight out of the Bill Peters playbook.)
“That’s not something that I’ve seen out of us, ever,” Brind’Amour said. “Give the other team a lot of credit. They came after it, but the lack of push-back that we needed is something that I haven’t seen out of this group.”
And: “It’s not even the score, it’s how we played that period that’s really disturbing for me.”
And: “Win or lose, you’ve got to be proud of how you play and that didn’t happen tonight.”
It was all a lot of different ways of not saying the same thing: When push came to shove, the Hurricanes packed it in and let the Bruins have their way. Which has, to be sure, a lot to do with the Bruins, who even without David Pastrnak are an absolute postseason juggernaut. But the Hurricanes also didn’t have to make it this easy for them.
Brind’Amour blamed his failure to properly prepare the Hurricanes for the third period in a very Roy Williams-esque way, but at a certain point this becomes a reality the Hurricanes players have to accept on their own.
“I love this team, I love my guys,” Brind’Amour said. “We learned a lesson today, though.”
Two years in a row, the Bruins have given the Hurricanes the same lesson in what it takes to win in the playoffs in this league. Will they pay attention this offseason?
Because the offseason is right around the corner. Normally, the old cliche is the fourth win is the toughest, but in the claustrophobic confines of the NHL’s postseason bubbles, it might actually be the easiest. Players, away from home for three weeks now, sequestered and stultified, will be inexorably drawn toward the light at the end of the tunnel. In Toronto and Edmonton, series leaders are a collective 7-3 in non-winner-take-all elimination games. There’s only so much fight left in these dogs.
And in this series, the size of the dog in the fight has mattered, too. When the Bruins finally came to play, when they started hitting to hurt — like Charlie McAvoy’s thud that knocked Jordan Staal out of the game — too many Hurricanes wanted no part of that. The Bruins are built for this. Nothing comes easy. For the second straight year, they’re asking questions not enough of the Hurricanes even want to hear, let alone answer. In the Eastern Conference, that’s where the bar is set.
In some areas, the Hurricanes are not far off, even way ahead of the curve, with their talented young forwards and mobile, modern defense. In other areas, they’re not even close. The Bruins are mentally and physically tougher, especially on the third and fourth lines, where the Hurricanes absolutely wilted.
“It’s not a dirty game, but it’s a game you need to play in this situation,” Hurricanes forward Jordan Martinook said. “You’re not going to run and gun with this team. We definitely didn’t play that way.”
James Reimer kept the Hurricanes in this one as long as he could, but once it began to fall apart it fell apart completely. By the time the Hurricanes took their first shot of the third period — after four Boston goals in less than seven minutes — they had gone from up 2-0 to down 4-2.
“It snowballed into something we didn’t want and we couldn’t catch it in time,” Hurricanes forward Justin Williams said.
That Teuvo Teravainen scored on that first shot of the third, the second time in the game the Hurricanes scored on their first shot of a period after Williams’ opener, only underscored what a poor job they did of putting a shaky Jaroslav Halak to the test. When it came time to play a simple, ugly game and lock down a win against a better team, the Hurricanes couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do it.
“We weren’t ready to do that dig-in that we need to do,” Brind’Amour said. “Little battles. They threw everything at us and we didn’t have an answer. It was tough to watch, that’s for sure.”
He may not have to watch much more of it. It’ll be a miracle if the Hurricanes are even in the game Wednesday since their bags appeared to be packed, mentally, halfway through Monday’s third period. When, even if Brind’Amour won’t say it, they quit.
This story was originally published August 18, 2020 at 12:19 AM.
