Hurricanes’ season comes to an end when they let the Bruins off the hook, again
The lasting image from the final game of the Carolina Hurricanes’ season shouldn’t be the goal Patrice Bergeron scored on Petr Mrazek in the final seconds of the second period — banking the puck off Mrazek’s far skate from behind the net — but a chance Jordan Staal had earlier in the period.
It was a minor miracle Staal was playing at all, having been knocked out of Game 4 with a sturdy, legal hit by Boston Bruins defenseman Charlie McAvoy that was the fulcrum of the Hurricanes’ collapse. They still had a one-goal lead then when their captain had to leave the game. The Bruins scored the second of their four straight goals almost immediately afterward.
That was not-so-ancient history Wednesday, with the Hurricanes facing elimination in Game 5. Staal was playing and so were the Hurricanes, dominating play, at least at even strength. Whatever had gone into the third-period capitulation on Monday wasn’t evident at the start of Game 5. But when Staal had as good a chance as any the Hurricanes had, wide open, cutting into the slot with the puck, he fired it straight into Jaroslav Halak’s belly.
When the Bruins had chances like that shortly afterward, they finished. The Hurricanes, throughout a series they lost 4-1, too often let them off the hook.
The Hurricanes had a chance to be up two or three goals Wednesday instead of the one-goal lead they took into the second period. But with only Sebastian Aho’s line generating any production throughout the playoffs, a pair of power play goals ended up enough for the Bruins to end the Hurricanes’ season with a 2-1 win.
The second of them was an absolute soul-destroyer, the clock in single digits when Bergeron saw Mrazek off his post and fired the puck off Mrazek’s far skate from below the goal line, somehow going five-hole from behind the net in a feat of hockey impossibility.
Errors like that are unforgivable in the playoffs, just like the squandered power plays and bad penalties and all of the Hurricanes’ other self-inflicted wounds.
All five games were within a goal in the final minute. That’s how close the Hurricanes came. And yet the gap between them and the Bruins was obviously much larger than that.
“We got beat in a few different little areas,” Staal said. “Special teams, obviously. A couple other things that kind of killed us. They found ways to win games.”
For such a young team, even one with its best days still ahead of it, this still had an end-of-an-era feel to it. Justin Williams, surely, will not be coming back for any or all of next season, although past practice indicates it would be premature to count him out quite yet. And it’s fair to ask if Staal, the old warhorse, is starting to slow down at 31. There will still be a place for him — and there are still three more years left on his contract — but he may not be able to play the same heavy minutes going forward.
So there are changes ahead, even among the younger players. The Hurricanes have exquisite top-end skill in Sebastian Aho and Andrei Svechnikov and as mobile and versatile a defensive corps as there is in the NHL, but there are clearly missing pieces, holes the Bruins so easily exposed. It’s tough to analytically quantify being hard to play against, but the Bruins have a ton of depth forwards and defensemen who fit that description.
The Hurricanes, at this point, do not. Jaccob Slavin and Brett Pesce can infuriate the opposition with their defensive acumen, but they don’t inspire fear. Then there’s Jordan Martinook and Joel Edmundson — the latter an impending free agent who may not be signed, sorely missed after getting injured in Game 1 — and that’s about it.
They’re now built to make the playoffs, and they did that this year, to their credit. For a franchise that hadn’t been to the playoffs in consecutive years in almost two decades, that’s no small accomplishment.
But the Bruins have twice now shown them what it takes to win in the postseason, winning eight of nine postseason games spread over 16 months. The question is whether the Hurricanes are paying attention, in the front office and on the bench alike.
“The maturity of our group from this year to last year, we made a huge step,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “We closed the gap with the elite teams. We’re closing in. As long as we learn what it takes to win, which I think we are, and we have this series, I think it’s going to help this group moving forward.”
But when the Hurricanes had their chances to extend the series Wednesday — and even before that — they made it easy on the Bruins. The Bruins would never.
This story was originally published August 19, 2020 at 7:33 PM.
