Hurricanes had every chance to finish Bruins. Now, season comes down to that: chance
This probably should have been over after four or five games, and it absolutely should have been over after six. The Carolina Hurricanes’ failure to take control of their own destiny has officially come back to haunt them.
Their five-on-five dominance early in this series has now gone for naught. Their season now comes down to a single game.
A single game Saturday in which anything can happen, in which the first six games of this series become all but meaningless, in which one bad bounce, one accidental error, can make 88 games of work moot.
The Hurricanes had every chance to put the Boston Bruins away Thursday night, and now their present and future comes down to just that: chance.
“We would have loved to have finished the job here,” Hurricanes defenseman Jaccob Slavin said. “It is what it is. This is hockey. It’s the playoffs. We just have to go home and take care of the job.”
That the Hurricanes have been virtually unassailable at home in this series may be a source of comfort, but it is scant comfort, at that. Certainly it’s better to be there than Boston, where the Hurricanes have engaged in any manner of self-sabotage, but they managed to introduce the grim spectre of an early elimination with this 5-2 loss when they easily could have avoided it entirely.
For all of their issues in Boston, they were gifted the ultimate in gilt-edged chances, four early power plays including almost a full minute of two-man advantage. They did almost nothing with any of it, hitting the iron twice early but never truly threatening. Inevitably, the Bruins got the next power play and doubled their lead to 2-0.
“At the end of the day, it’s got to be a goal,” Nino Niederreiter said. “Pretty simple. If you have a chance five-on-three in the playoffs, you’ve got to make them count. It kind of broke us a little.”
There is one unassailable rule of special teams that applies at all times, but especially in the playoffs: Give up a shorty or fail to score on a five-on-three, and you’ve crossed the streams of fate and failure.
Not that the Hurricanes were as good otherwise as they had been, even in the other games they lost in Boston. After a solid, scoreless first period, one bad line change by Tony DeAngelo led to an open look for Brad Marchand and the opening goal. The Bruins got a lucky bounce for their second on the power play.
And when the Hurricanes did finally get on the board on Andrei Svechnikov’s goal early in the third, they got away from their game, their identity. Sebastian Aho’s bad night — on the wrong end of a crushing Charlie McAvoy hit early, several cringeworthy turnovers after that — got worse when he turned the puck over at the offensive blue line and the Bruins turned that into a sustained possession as the Hurricanes missed multiple chances to clear. It ended in an Erik Haula goal, to add insult to injury.
“Kind of a tailspin in the third period,” Hurricanes captain Jordan Staal said. “We had it right there. We just didn’t quite stick with it.”
Throw in too many poor performances and passengers, from Aho to DeAngelo to Martin Necas — who Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour basically called out Thursday morning, as starkly as he ever will one of his own players — and the Hurricanes made all of it too hard on themselves. Necas ended up flipped with Max Domi in the third period, demoted to the fourth line. Even Svechnikov’s second goal was after matters were decided; only Antti Raanta was truly on his game for 60 minutes, and the Bruins might have scored seven or eight if he hadn’t been.
“We had some guys that didn’t play well tonight,“ Brind’Amour said. “Let’s be blunt.”
None of that was where the game was decided, though. Make no mistake: The failure to convert on the kind of opportunity that comes along on the road in the playoffs only once in a very great while had serious consequences.
“You got to get a couple there,” Niederreiter said.
It left the Hurricanes exactly where they did not want to be: Home, not to rest up for the next round, but for a Game 7 against a newly confident Bruins team that has gone from shaken after Game 5 to seeing a light that wasn’t there before.
Of course, take care of business at home, as the Hurricanes have three times already in this series, and all is forgotten and all is forgiven. But there is no margin for error now, not in a one-game series with everything on the line when it didn’t need to be.
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This story was originally published May 12, 2022 at 10:36 PM with the headline "Hurricanes had every chance to finish Bruins. Now, season comes down to that: chance."
