‘A 20-year-old can’t be your best player’: Why are Hurricanes stars struggling in playoffs?
When Seth Jarvis is your best player, as the rookie was during an otherwise desultory first period Tuesday night that set the tone for a 4-1 loss, that cuts both ways.
It’s remarkable, at this point, how comfortable the winger has been in the postseason, both in open ice and tight quarters, not the biggest player on the ice but playing like it at times.
He also stands out because he’s doing what many of his more experienced, higher salaried, increasingly frustrated teammates are not.
“A 20-year-old can’t be your best player,” Carolina Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said, referring to Jarvis. “That’s kind of what’s happening here and that’s not going to work.”
No, it is not.
This is becoming an old story — it was true at this point in the Boston series as well, and it ended up being Max Domi, of all people, saving the day in Game 7 — but the Hurricanes are built around the offense and scoring of Andrei Svechnikov and Sebastian Aho and Vincent Trocheck and Teuvo Teravainen and Martin Necas, $27.1 million a year on the hoof, and it’s not so much that they’re getting outplayed by their New York Rangers counterparts as they’ve been entirely ordinary.
The Jordan Staal line, as impenetrable as it has been at one end, has scored two goals in the past nine games. Even the fourth line, hardly expected to score, has certainly had the chances to chip in. And has not. Jesperi Kotkaniemi had five goals in 19 games for the Montreal Canadiens last postseason, albeit in a different role, and none in 11 for the Hurricanes. Domi scored his pair after getting promoted to Trocheck’s line; he has since returned. Necas hasn’t scored on any line. Lorentz and Derek Stepan and Jordan Martinook haven’t either.
Not to single them out, but they too are a symptom of a larger problem.
“We’re doing a very good job creating energy and hemming in their fourth line,” Lorentz said. “It just seems like we get chances and they don’t go and we just look at each other like, we’ve just got to stick with it. Eventually they’re going to go in. I do think we have to do a little bit better job producing. You’ve got to be able to produce all four lines on a championship team.”
Which gets at the bigger picture: The Hurricanes, despite being two wins away from the conference finals, haven’t played like a Stanley Cup contender. They haven’t risen to the level to which they rose in the regular season. They haven’t done what Tampa Bay – already awaiting the winner of this series – or Colorado have done, taking care of business and plowing through one series after another.
They’ve avoided the soft option and chosen the hard one every time. They’re the can’t-stand-prosperity All-Stars, staking out 2-0 leads in both series only to give it all back on the road when they had every opportunity to avoid doing so – even more in this series than the last, because the margin separating these teams has been far thinner than it should be.
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“We go into the series, and we know we’re playing against a real good hockey team over there. We’ve battled with them and competed,” Rangers coach Gerard Gallant said. “But I think these four games have all been, anybody could have won any one of the games, I really believe that. I know we executed real well tonight and finished off a power-play goal and had a couple nice plays, that was the difference in the game. There’s not much in the four games, in any of those games, where a team ran away with it.”
Which is another way of saying, as erratically as the Hurricanes have performed, all four games were there for the taking. Igor Shesterkin has been good, but only marginally better than Antti Raanta. The Hurricanes are once again dragging out a series because they didn’t take control when they had the chance.
“Our power play’s got to contribute,” Jarvis said. “We’ve got to do something. Get pucks on net, anything to get past him. Get in front of him. You’re not going to beat him on the first shot, it’s the second, third, fourth.”
The 20-year-old speaks truth. His more decorated teammates, of whom much is given and much is expected, should listen closely. Before it’s too late.
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This story was originally published May 25, 2022 at 11:32 AM with the headline "‘A 20-year-old can’t be your best player’: Why are Hurricanes stars struggling in playoffs?."
