Hurricanes’ record regular season sets them up well for Stanley Cup Playoff grind
At the very end of the very long beginning, the Carolina Hurricanes made it look so easy. Even with some of their best players watching from the press box, they were up three goals and cruising in mere minutes, a suitable conclusion to a season that saw the Hurricanes win the Metropolitan Division and shatter records set by that team.
They eclipsed the regular-season points record set in 2006. They recorded consecutive division titles for the first time in franchise history, in two different divisions, no less. They did, in short, just about everything they set out to do — meeting the very lofty expectations they set for themselves a little less than a year ago in the aftermath of their elimination at the hands of the Tampa Bay Lightning.
That exit prompted a summer retooling on the fly from the net out, and it seemed fitting the final piece of the puzzle — Jesperi Kotkaniemi, poached via offer sheet and since re-signed to an eminently reasonable contract — had three points in less than eight minutes Thursday. (That’s not to sell Seth Jarvis, who later played his way onto the roster in training camp, short. Jarvis was going to get here eventually. His early arrival proved timely.)
After all that, they’ll still have to wait a day to figure out whether their reward is yet another rematch with the Boston Bruins or a rematch with the Lightning, both vying for the role of perennial postseason partner once played by the New Jersey Devils — Thursday’s 6-3 victim at PNC Arena. Either way, they’re going to face one of the teams that ended their past two seasons, with a chance to surpass them.
Amid this ascent to become one of the best teams in the NHL, none of this should be taken for granted. The uncommon luxury of clinching a playoff berth with three weeks to spare is a wonderful reward for a season well played, but even if it was inevitable this season, even if it should be — has to be — merely the beginning, it’s still worth celebrating.
It wasn’t too long ago that these final home games were exercises in futile optimism, the Hurricanes long since eliminated from the playoffs year after year after year, meaningless salutes to fans willing to stick it out to the bitter end. Thursday night was no less meaningless, for all the right reasons, another division banner already ordered to join the others, a first in the Metro to join the three from the Southeast and one from the Central.
Attention turns quickly to the postseason, but it’s worth taking this moment to acknowledge the particular accomplishment of the past seven months, a season in which the Hurricanes sought, and claimed, a place among the NHL’s elite.
The playoffs are, thanks to the vagaries of goaltending and injuries and sheer randomness, inherently unpredictable. A franchise that once had “just find a way in and anything can happen” as its mission statement – and went on to prove that in 2002 and 2009 and even 2019 – knows that as well as any.
But the regular season is a proving ground, less the war of attrition that the playoffs always become than an ultramarathon, always testing every facet of the roster for skill and depth and grit and raw talent, demanding resilience not only on a game-to-game basis but week to week, month to month. At one point, what seems like decades ago, the Hurricanes had to play two skaters short thanks to the NHL’s COVID rules ... and still won. They needed five different goalies to get to the end, with the fifth of them — the late-arriving Pyotr Kochetkov — perhaps providing the margin between winning the division and not.
There’s never any shortage of emotion and motivation in the playoffs, and there certainly won’t be for the Hurricanes against either the Bruins or the Lightning, but it takes true commitment to muster it night after night after night, all just to get to this point. The Stanley Cup may be the truest test of any postseason, but an NHL regular season is an equally stout examination, without the same glory at the end. The Hurricanes passed this one.
It’s easy to say the hard part starts now, but this wasn’t easy, either.
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This story was originally published April 28, 2022 at 9:32 PM with the headline "Hurricanes’ record regular season sets them up well for Stanley Cup Playoff grind."
