It took the skill of a 22-year-old to unlock the Predators and help the Canes take control
The coach spoke and the 22-year-old listened. Down a goal as the third period wound down, the Carolina Hurricanes saw their season slipping away, the end approaching all too quickly, and Rod Brind’Amour decided it was time to make one last stand.
During a television timeout with nine minutes to go, he moved up and down the bench, red-faced, arms waving, imploring his team not to let all their hard work this season go to waste. Martin Necas took matters into his own hands.
Only moments later, Necas took the puck at his own blue line, right in front of Brind’Amour on the Hurricanes’ bunch, blew past two Nashville Predators in the neutral zone, turned the corner on another on his way to the Nashville net, circled behind it and stuck a wraparound behind Juuse Saros, an extraordinary individual effort to tie the score and force overtime.
After two straight double overtime losses, Jordan Staal needed just 104 seconds to swat a rebound out of the air for a 3-2 win and send the Hurricanes back to Nashville for Game 6 on Thursday -- not staving off elimination but with a chance to clinch, and it was the incredibly skilled winger and the coach with a sense of when his team needed a kick in the butt who put them in that position.
“We definitely have talent and we’re going to get a goal like that every seven or eight games,” Brind’Amour said. “That happens. The other part of our game is that grind game that we have to play this time of year. We did that for two periods. The talent got us back in the game. Basically a solo effort got us back to have a chance to win the game.”
The Hurricanes have spent so much of this series grinding away like a hamster on a wheel, skating furiously and getting nowhere, only for every little mistake to end up in the back of their own net. The Predators have made all the big plays, got both double-overtime goals and pushed the Hurricanes to the brink Tuesday night.
Brind’Amour, as a captain, always had a sense of when he needed to stand up and speak, and it wasn’t as often as you might think. This was one of those moments. A lot of that is conducted behind closed doors as a coach, but this time it was on display for everyone to see. So were the effects.
“He was just saying, this is what our year is coming down to,” said Hurricanes defenseman Jaccob Slavin, back in the lineup for the first time since Game 1. “We’re either going to take advantage or we’re going to have all this work we’ve done for nothing.”
Necas scored almost immediately, his second of the game, and from the Hurricanes’ perspective that should have been the winner long before Staal’s overtime heroics. A would-be tying goal was disallowed at the end of the second period, when Warren Foegele made glancing contact with Saros just inside the crease before Roman Josi then piled on top of his own goalie.
Foegele wasn’t the reason Saros couldn’t get to the puck as it deflected off Staal’s skate, but by the letter of a very stupid NHL rule, everything that happened after Foegele and Saros came together in the blue paint was immaterial. Josi could have given Saros a bear hug, it wouldn’t have mattered.
The NHL, like the NFL once did with the catch rule, continues to engage in this theater of the absurd, attempting to enforce a subjective concept objectively through replay review, which is how plays that seem like obvious goalie interference are judged to be OK and plays like this one where the goalie was clearly impeded by a player from his own team are not.
Not that the hermeneutics of it were any consolation to the Hurricanes or their fans, but Necas’ goal certainly was.
At 22, there’s still so much hockey in front of him, and while the book remains open on whether he’ll be the top-six center the Hurricanes drafted him to be or just a very skilled winger, he also showed Tuesday what a valuable niche that can be, a forward whose speed can be a game-breaking weapon but still has the skill to be a threat when moving more slowly.
It took that kind of individual brilliance to unlock the Predators, because nothing else the Hurricanes were doing worked.
“(Necas) obviously has some great talent and he found a way to get us going,” Staal said. “They were doing a good job of clogging everything up. We had a tough time getting in their end, a tough time creating. Talent like that can change a game.”
The Predators have collapsed around Saros and blocked shots and cleared rebounds. They’ve made the Hurricanes look like a finesse team with more skill than grit. And in a series that continues to be impossibly close -- within a goal or tied for 359:55 of the 372:48 played -- they have made nearly every big play.
But not Tuesday, when a coach, a captain and a kid combined to turn a game, and a series, around.
This story was originally published May 26, 2021 at 12:15 AM with the headline "It took the skill of a 22-year-old to unlock the Predators and help the Canes take control."
