Hurricanes have been resilient in the playoffs. They’ll need to be again
The Carolina Hurricanes have used the word “resilience” a lot the past few weeks. The players have said it. Canes coach Rod Brind’Amour has used it. They put it on game-day towels at PNC Arena.
The Canes had Nashville Predators score first in five of the six games in the opening round of the Stanley Cup playoffs but were resilient.
The Canes had defenseman Jaccob Slavin miss three games against the Predators but were resilient.
The Canes lost double-overtime games in back-to-back games to Nashville, with some players logging a gazillion minutes, but were resilient. They trailed late in Game 5 and Game 6 of the series but were relentlessly resilient, tying the score each time — Martin Necas and Dougie Hamilton with the goals — to win the games in overtime and clinch the playoff series.
Now comes another test. The Canes were beaten 2-1 on Sunday by the Tampa Bay Lightning in Game 1 of their second-round series. While battling the 2020 Stanley Cup champion hard and even much of the game, they lost on a score from an unexpected source, Barclay Goodrow, and in unexpected fashion as goalie Alex Nedeljkovic let in a very soft goal.
It happens, as they say. There’s always adversity in the playoffs, they say. The Canes also had it in the regular season with injuries to goalie Petr Mrazek and forward Teuvo Teravainen that kept them out for long stretches.
“Nothing has come easy for this group, ever,” Brind’Amour said after the game. “Nothing’s ever handed to them. Everything they’ve gotten, they’ve earned. There’s never been an easy game. It seems like there has never been anything that’s gone easily.
“Obviously we’re in the playoffs. We’re going to have to go earn every inch of ice that we get, every goal. But this group’s always bounced back. I don’t expect anything different.”
The Canes will have to do it without forward Nino Niederreiter who did not play Sunday. Brind’Amour said Niederreiter will miss the series with an upper-body injury suffered Saturday in practice. Another blow.
There was much to the good Sunday for the Canes. But as Brind’Amour said, it takes more than one goal to win most games and that’s all the Canes could manage in Game 1 against the Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy.
Defenseman Jake Bean did get a shot from the point past him on a power play early in the third. Brett Pesce and Necas had shots that hit the iron during the game, near-misses. There were a number of jam sessions in front of the Tampa Bay net, the kind that Niederreiter — who scored 20 goals in the regular season — often has been in the middle of during his bounce-back season.
“I felt like we played our game for the most part but we can crank it up even more,” said forward Jordan Martinook, who replaced Niederreiter on Vincent Trocheck’s line. “We had stretches where it looked how it needs to look, but I think there can be more stretches like that and it’s every guy giving one percent or two percent more.”
That’s the essence of resilience, isn’t it? Being able to muster a little more when needed? And especially in the playoffs.
The Canes surrendered the home-ice edge by losing the series opener. It would be easy to say they gave the Lightning, which was missing injured defenseman David Savard, their best shot Sunday and didn’t win. Game 2, for the Canes, could be a game of survival in the series.
Another test of resilience.
“Absolutely,” Bean said. “That’s kind of our mantra here. There’s a lot of good teams that we’re going to have to go through and play, and we just need to take it one day at a time. When adversity strikes, we’re going to try and be resilient.”
This story was originally published May 31, 2021 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Hurricanes have been resilient in the playoffs. They’ll need to be again."
