Probably too late, but not too little as Hurricanes look like themselves
It only took three embarrassing losses, their season pushed to the brink of elimination and a Russian rookie defenseman thrown into the deep end of the borscht for the Carolina Hurricanes to finally show up and make their presence felt.
And there they were Monday night, piling up shots, playing with the resolute directness that distinguished them for most of the previous eight months, if not most of the previous seven years, at least until they ran into the Florida Panthers last week and suddenly started making mistakes that made them look like a completely different team.
After three unexplained and unaccountable absences that led to three blowout losses, the Hurricanes were finally present, accounted for, doing Hurricanes things and finally putting some pressure on the Panthers.
It may very well be too late. It was, for one game, finally not too little.
A pair of empty-net goals may have flattered the final 3-0 score, but the Hurricanes earned them by shedding the mental baggage they had been carrying and being nothing more than themselves.
“We haven’t seen a lot of that this series so far,” goalie Frederik Andersen said, after his second shutout of the playoffs.
“It was how we need to play if we’re going to have a chance,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “We gave ourselves a chance. And that’s everything.”
Even the scoreless first period was an accomplishment given the way the Panthers have toyed with the Hurricanes in this series, before Logan Stankoven put them up 1-0 with a nasty top-shelf, short-side wrister from the left wing, his fifth goal of the playoffs and worthy of the Hurricanes’ best player in this series.
Stankoven had been set loose there by a deft cross-ice backhand pass from Alexander Nikishin — ironically, exactly the kind of tricky play the Hurricanes have been trying, and failing, to make all series. You love it when it works. Even better for the Hurricanes, Nikishin had the confidence to try it and the skill to pull it off, getting better with every game and even fencing with Matthew Tkachuk at one point.
But after all the inexplicable turnovers of games 2 and 3 inclusive, the Hurricanes got back to their usual north-south forthrightness and outshot the Panthers 28-20. Some of that might have had something to do with the Panthers’ growing injury list — especially defenseman Niko Mikkola, injured in Game 3 after missing a check on Stankoven — but there was also a familiar simplicity to the Hurricanes’ game that they had been lacking in this series. Getting back to that got results.
“It was definitely more our game,” said Hurricanes captain Jordan Staal, who scored the second empty-net goal. “I don’t know exactly what it was, beyond we just did it.”
A rested Andersen didn’t hurt, either, not that goaltending has been the Hurricanes’ critical failure in this series. He made a point-blank stop on Evan Rodrigues on a third-period Panthers power play to preserve the narrow lead — which might have been bigger, had Eric Robinson been able to stay onside before feeding Mark Jankowski for what would have been a 2-0 lead. A smirking Paul Maurice won the challenge.
The only way the Hurricanes were ever going to dispense with the conference-finals narrative was to actually go and win a game; they have, now, for the first time since June 1, 2006, breaking a 15-game losing streak stretched over 16 years. (“I think ‘Jordo’ was on the other side when it started,” Andersen said. That is a fact; Staal’s Pittsburgh Penguins swept Brind’Amour and the Hurricanes in 2009.)
Coming back from 3-0 down is a different narrative, one only four teams in NHL history have overcome. Justin Williams did it most recently, elsewhere, against Brent Burns no less, and the Hurricanes were able to force a Game 6 last year against the New York Rangers but no more.
Still, you can’t win four in a row without winning the first, and by winning on the road and shutting down a team that had been averaging almost a goal and a half per period, the Hurricanes will at least force the Panthers to engage in some serious introspection of their own ahead of Game 5.
They stayed alive. More to the point, they actually looked alive. It might not be enough. But it was something, after a series full of nothing.
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This story was originally published May 26, 2025 at 10:58 PM.
