Nedeljkovic, so good so far for the Hurricanes, wavers on the winner
Even on a Tuesday in January, it would have been a brutal goal at the end of a discouraging play.
It started when Jani Hakanpaa couldn’t get the puck out of the zone. Barclay Goodrow skated down the left wing, cut inside and was forced back outside by Brady Skjei, then took a speculative shot from just above the goal line, harmlessly you might even say, from Alex Nedeljkovic’s right.
Nedeljkovic, so good for the Carolina Hurricanes in the playoffs, had a good look and scrambled toward the post but left a gap between his right pad and the post along the ice. Goodrow’s shot caromed off the pad and somehow went in. Short side. Tight angle. Near post.
Back-breaking in the middle of the season. At this moment, with seven minutes to go in a playoff game, at home, the first of a new round against the defending champs, it’s a potential series-breaker.
The Hurricanes had scrapped and scraped for everything against the Tampa Bay Lightning on Sunday, nothing coming easy — not that it has for this team even in the best of times — playing from behind and tying the score early in the third. And then the Lightning got as easy a goal as you’ll ever see with seven minutes to go for the 2-1 game-winner in front of the largest crowd yet at PNC Arena, the Hurricanes’ first loss at home this postseason.
The Hurricanes have prided themselves on their resilience, but this will be as difficult to recover from, in its own way, as either double overtime loss.
“It’s tough. Tough for everybody,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “It’s no use hiding it. It’s a no-good goal. A bad goal. He’s going to admit it. It happens. He made a lot of good saves tonight, too. That’s part of it. We’ll bounce back and he’ll bounce back. We’ve got to score more than one to win anyway. That’s the way I look at it. We had our chances. We’ve got to make it tougher for them.”
Nedeljkovic made some huge saves and only gave up two goals, the first on a deflection against Tampa Bay’s potent power play, but the other was just awful. One too many under any circumstances. It’s not something that’s been an issue in the playoffs.
There was the one goal in Game 4 in Nashville, when Nedeljkovic jumped to play the puck and missed it, but for the most part he’s been a rock, a constant, utterly reliable and consistently composed during a postseason when the Hurricanes quietly have not gotten enough production — and Brind’Amour’s quiet frustration is starting to show as he shuffles his lines — from several key players.
That includes Andrei Svechnikov, Teuvo Teravainen and Nino Niederreiter before he was injured in practice Saturday and went from probable for Sunday to “very, very doubtful” for the series in the space of 32 hours. Vincent Trocheck has been flying around, but only has three points to show for it. If the Hurricanes were getting more from some of their big guns, maybe Nedeljkovic’s howler wouldn’t have been so magnified.
It also doesn’t help that the guy at the other end of the ice has never made a habit of handing out freebies. Andrei Vasilevskiy was as good as expected, screened by Jesper Fast on Jake Bean’s power-play goal to start the first period, and prone to giving up juicy rebounds the Hurricanes couldn’t convert, but otherwise seamless. His excellence leaves no margin for error, so when a goal like that goes in at the other end, the stakes are exponentially higher.
“Plays get magnified so much in the playoffs,” Hurricanes forward Jordan Martinook said. “The further you go the more and more each little play matters. I think we might have had a couple tonight that we’re trying to do the right thing but it’s just where it might not go — we need it to go five feet more, 10 feet more. But it’s little fixes. Everybody’s trying their hardest out there, everybody’s putting 100 percent effort out.”
This one game, that one goal, won’t shake the Hurricanes’ confidence in Nedeljkovic, earned the hard way during the Nashville series, but it does make their task more difficult against the Lightning. They did a lot of things right Sunday but couldn’t capitalize, and there’s no question as a team — and especially some individuals — they have more to give.
That’s true across the board, but especially in net. The Hurricanes don’t necessarily have to win the goaltending battle. But they certainly can’t lose it like this.
This story was originally published May 30, 2021 at 8:55 PM.
