Why Hurricanes’ Game 1 loss to the Panthers conjures bad playoff memories
It’s like a nightmare the Carolina Hurricanes keep reliving. They can’t wake up. Years pass, seasons fade into one another, nothing changes.
This might as well have been Game 5 against the Florida Panthers in 2023. There’s no direct connection, no rhyme or reason, so many new faces, and yet the first game of this series was all too similar to all the games in that series.
A late power-play goal cut the final margin to 5-2 on Tuesday, but the Hurricanes were down at the start, briefly threatened to make a game of it and then watched it slip, slip, slip away. Two years ago, all four losses were closer than this, but the aura of being outfoxed at every turn during the Eastern Conference finals was nearly identical.
“They put more stress on us than we did on them,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “That’s how they play it. They’re the best and we’re trying to beat it.”
The first period was all of that: A bad call against the Hurricanes — Sebastian Aho, for a tepid swipe at Anton Lundell in response to a two-handed slash that went unpenalized, exactly the kind of penalty the Hurricanes have largely avoided in this postseason — leads to a power-play goal. A ghastly turnover by Jordan Staal 20 feet from his own net ends up quickly in his own net.
It wasn’t over at 2-0, less than 10 minutes in, but it all felt eerily familiar. If Aho’s goal with 15 seconds to go in the first had been thrown out by Toronto for a distinct kicking motion, it would have been an early Hurricanes bingo — and someone might have closed out their card anyway when Andrei Svechnikov was called for an offensive-zone penalty in the second.
The Hurricanes had outscored the opposition 16-6 in the third period and overtime this postseason, but they were outscored in the final period Tuesday, even after Brad Marchand gifted them a power play for attacking Shayne Gostisbehere. (“I was pretty pissed off,” Gostisbehere said. “He tried to take a run at me and I shot the puck at him. It is what it is.”) The Panthers, meanwhile, scored four goals on their first 16 shots, and it wasn’t like Frederik Andersen was fighting the puck.
“They buried their chances when they had them,” Staal said, and that’s been the perpetual story of the Hurricanes and Panthers in the third round, especially with Sergei Bobrovsky in the Florida net denying the Hurricanes from doing the same.
So that’s five straight playoff losses to the Panthers and 13 straight in this round, period, since June 1, 2006. Eric Staal and Erik Cole were on the ice that night; their efforts to cheer the Hurricanes on from a suite Tuesday went unheeded. It didn’t help that Scott Morrow had a tough playoff debut, minus-3 after being thrown into the deep end for the injured and sorely missed Jalen Chatfield, but this was hardly on one player.
“We definitely had our looks,” Gostisbehere said. “Bob stood tall for sure. We’ve just got to stick to it. It’s right there. You could really see it.”
In a vacuum, it’s nothing. It’s one bad night, the first home loss of these playoffs. Not something the Hurricanes have dealt with this spring, but hardly an insurmountable hurdle.
Nothing, in hockey, happens in a vacuum. History lingers. Just ask the New Jersey Devils.
The Panthers have been the Hurricanes’ kryptonite, with Bobrovsky continuing to wield the same mojo over them as Igor Shestkerin has in the past, and unless or until the Hurricanes figure out how to play their game against the Panthers with the same relentless pressure as they do pretty much everyone else, that history is going to keep lingering and repeating.
“That’s a good team,” Staal said. “They’re going to do the same thing we’re doing. They do very similar stuff and they try to grind you down, too. They’re here for a reason. They know how to do it.”
The layoff — five days since closing out the Washington Capitals in five games — may have had something to do with that, especially against a team that was basically picking up where it left off 48 hours ago in a Game 7 road win to complete a far more intense series than either the Hurricanes played.
That’s a level of intensity the Hurricanes are going to have to figure out a way to match from the start Thursday, just as they have to find a way to fight the broad sweep of history that keeps pushing back at them. It’s just one game, but they have some work to do to keep it from becoming another and another and another, again.
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This story was originally published May 20, 2025 at 11:11 PM.
