Absence of the indispensable Jaccob Slavin only underlined his value to the Hurricanes
On the first goal, Jaccob Slavin skated forward, getting behind the defense and picking out a wide-open Dougie Hamilton at the back door.
On the second, seven minutes later, Slavin took the shot off a faceoff win that Sebastian Aho tipped past Juuse Saros to end the series.
The Carolina Hurricanes struggled without Slavin in the lineup. With him, they haven’t lost in the playoffs. He set up the two biggest goals of Game 6, completing the comeback to close out the Nashville Predators with a 4-3 overtime win. He made a subtle play to facilitate Jordan Staal’s overtime winner in Game 5.
And that -- all of that -- pales in comparison to his ability to defuse attacks on defense with his positioning or a subtle stick, or the way he makes every player on the ice with him better. On Thursday, he was on the ice for all three Carolina even-strength goals, and scoring chances were 15-7 in the Hurricanes’ favor with Slavin on the ice. Only Andrei Svechnikov, who has struggled mightily to score in this series, was better.
If there was any doubt about Slavin’s indispensability to the Hurricanes, and there really shouldn’t have been, the three games he missed in this series removed all doubt.
“He goes in the lineup, we didn’t lose, right?” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “He’s that important to this team.”
There was a delicate calculus in play here, a balancing of present and future, at heart a gamble. Slavin exited the Hurricanes’ penultimate regular-season game in Nashville for precautionary reasons, then sat out the final one with a “lower body” injury. He played in Game 1, a Carolina win, but sat out the next three.
The Hurricanes lost two of those in double overtime, Brett Pesce and Brady Skjei shouldering an impossible workload in Slavin’s absence as the games stretched out into oblivion, Jake Bean victimized on the Game 3 winner in a situation when he normally would not have been on the ice.
But if those were long games, Slavin was playing the long game all along.
“I think it’s progressing in the right way,” Slavin said. “As much as I hated sitting out those games, I think it was the right move. If we want to make a deep playoff run I want to be healthy in the later rounds as well and not push it too hard. It is feeling good the past two games. I felt good out there. I felt confident in my skating ability.”
The time away may have been necessary, but his return only highlighted how much he was missed. His mere presence lifts the entire team, and not only usual defensive partner Dougie Hamilton, although he probably missed Slavin more than anyone. Hamilton made some critical mental and defensive errors with Slavin out, so costly in a series where every goal was weighted with extraordinary value.
With Slavin back the past two games, Hamilton went from a partial liability to an overall asset, allowed to showcase his skills while obscuring any deficiencies.
But it’s not only Hamilton: Slavin eats up so much difficult ice time, it allows everyone else to slot into more reasonable roles.
“We all know he makes everybody around him better,” Brind’Amour said. “He plays with Dougie most of the time. That’s only going to make Dougie better.”
Ron Francis may have had his failings as a general manager -- an almost pathological unwillingness to make changes and catastrophic misses on goaltenders Eddie Lack and Scott Darling, just to start -- but the extraordinarily reasonable contract extensions he nailed down with Slavin ($5.3 million per year through 2025) and Pesce ($4.0 million through 2024) were his Mona Lisa. They’re both worth almost twice that much to the Hurricanes now.
Nationally, internationally, Hamilton’s point production has tended to inject him into the Norris Trophy conversation in a way Slavin’s quiet excellence does not. That really started to change during the Hurricanes’ playoff run in 2019, when Slavin was introduced to the hockey world at large through his immutable presence.
Two years later, his value was only underlined by his absence.
This story was originally published May 28, 2021 at 12:46 PM.
