Outplayed and outclassed, Hurricanes have come too far to play this poorly
Forget winning the series, let alone any thought of the Stanley Cup. Just try to avoid another sweep. Or at least win a period, for God’s sake. Maybe score a goal. Try walking away from an altercation for once.
Things are so bad for the Carolina Hurricanes they need to set their sights lower, as low as they get. How about: Stop embarrassing themselves. Might be a good place to start.
By the end of the second period, fans were even chanting “shoot the puck” at the home team, right before the Florida Panthers scored their fourth goal in a 5-0 win.
You endure the whole season, through 82 long games, through two rounds of the playoffs, for the right — the privilege – to be here, on this stage, playing for these stakes. And sometimes the better team does win, even wins six games in a row, but you have to at least show a little more fight than this.
It’s too hard to get this far to go down this easy once you’re here.
“Obviously, we just have to figure out how to win a period,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said.
The total margin of victory in this series is already twice as large as it was in 2023, and we’re only halfway to another sweep, which may not be inevitable, but certainly feels that way.
Not only can the Hurricanes not impose their will the way they did in the first two rounds, they can’t play their game at all. The team that was questioned for its “shot volume approach” had all of seven shots through two periods and basically abandoned the aggressive forecheck that is the Hurricanes’ trademark.
That wasn’t boring hockey. This actually is.
“They’re just doing it better, no question,” Hurricanes captain Jordan Staal said. “They’ve been the better team, especially tonight.”
If getting mocked by your own fans in your own building en route to a 14th straight conference-finals loss isn’t bad enough — “We didn’t have enough shots tonight, so there’s probably something to that,” Hurricanes forward Taylor Hall said — Game 2 started badly for the Hurricanes and got worse.
Andrei Svechnikov kicked it off by throwing a blind pass up the boards against the Florida forecheck. In a flash it was on Gustav Forsling’s stick in the slot and the Hurricanes were playing from behind after only 77 seconds.
Svechnikov was on the ice for three goals against and watched the third Florida goal from the penalty box after punching Matthew Tkachuk in the back of the head for no reason, a power-play goal seconds after Sergei Bobrovsky stopped Jordan Martinook on a short-handed breakaway and Jordan Staal couldn’t get to the rebound.
“I made the couple of turnovers in our (defensive) zone and they scored,” Svechnikov said. “So my mistake, my mistake totally. And, you know, I can’t do anything right now, so got to move on and think positively.”
When the Hurricanes did dent Bobrovsky, Sebastian Aho shooting it off his right pad and in, it didn’t count. What looked like Tkachuk playing the puck back into his own zone actually came off Brent Burns. The Panthers are soundly beating the Hurricanes even in the offside-challenge department.
And then there are the depth issues on defense, which certainly raise the question of how the Hurricanes expected to manage an injury on the blue line if one came up at any point. Jalen Chatfield took warmups but wasn’t ready to go, which left Scott Morrow in the lineup after his painful playoff debut in Game 1 over Alexander Nikishin, who had a rough debut of his own in Game 5 of the second round — a series of cascading and critical failures.
Morrow didn’t play in the first 12 minutes and the Hurricanes were essentially down to four defensemen for a bit after Sean Walker took a hard hit from A.J. Green coming across the middle. If Riley Stillman and Ty Smith aren’t up to the task when the other options are rookies who are clearly not ready, why are they even here? What was the plan if a defenseman got hurt, anyway? Hope for the best? Pray?
If the Hurricanes want to stop being asked about why they can’t beat the Panthers, they’re going to have to not only beat the Panthers at some point, but play at their level once in a while. That wasn’t an issue in 2023, when three of the games were decided on the final play, but neither game this year has even been close. The Panthers are faster, stronger, more opportunistic and more determined. Other than that, it’s pretty even.
“They’re not a perfect hockey team,” Hall said. “We just have to play our game, and we haven’t really.”
In the ongoing absence of that, the Hurricanes are getting absolutely rolled, in a way that hasn’t happened in a playoff series since they were swept by the Boston Bruins at this stage in 2019. That was at the beginning of this run of playoff appearances and playoff series wins, when nothing was expected and everything was a surprise.
The only surprise here is how noncompetitive the Hurricanes have been. Outplayed and outclassed. The Panthers aren’t only beating them at their own game; they’re playing a completely different one. They can change all that on the road, and bring the series back here even, but they’ll have to start somewhere after going nowhere.
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This story was originally published May 22, 2025 at 11:00 PM with the headline "Outplayed and outclassed, Hurricanes have come too far to play this poorly."
