Hurricanes are a high-pressure system
Their Game 2 overtime win over Vegas was a glorious example of Stanley Cup chaos
They weren’t true to their nickname, not at all. Everybody sees hurricanes coming. You can board up the windows and pack up the belongings. But the Carolina Hurricanes were barely a trickle on the pavement during the middle of Thursday’s Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final.
Vegas was cruising, up 2-0 on the scoreboard, up 1-0 in the Final because of its comeback from an 0-2 hole in Game 1. All Carolina had was the unfettered noise of their fans and the faith of coach Rod Brind’Armour, not that he had a choice.
Things weren’t going well. Brett Howden, channeling Claude Lemieux and Max Talbot and John Druce and other grunts who sprouted wings in the playoffs, picked up his 12th and 13th goals of the postseason for the Golden Knights. Howden had 12 in the regular season, but here he took a lob pass from Mitch Marner and shook off defenseman Sean Walker and scored, and then he was sprung loose by Ivan Barbashev’s pass and bulled past Jaccob Slavin to score again on Frederik Andersen. (Seven times, a player has exceeded his regular-season goal output in the playoffs. Lemieux did it three times.)
The Golden Knights had other chances, too, finding jujitsu ways to penalize Carolina’s head-first offensive pressure, moving the puck ahead and finding space all over the ice. The fact that Andersen kept Vegas stalled at 2-0 was of little comfort. Brind’Amour was shuffling lines the way he never had to do when the ‘Canes were rolling past Ottawa and Philadelphia and Montreal. A loss would have sent Carolina limping to Vegas, and the King Arthur-meets-Elvis pageant at T-Mobile Arena, with little guarantee of returning for more hockey.
But the weather can be funny in Hurricane country. Carolina’s Logan Stankoven went behind the goal and insisted on stealing a puck from Rasmus Andersson, and he came out and finally beat Carter Hart. A couple of minutes later, William Carrier fought off Jeremy Lauzon, who once led the NHL in hits, and captured a puck, and got it onside to Mark Jankowski, who zipped the tying goal past Hart’s shoulder. That’s “Stanks” and “Janky” in hockey parlance, and throats were straining and ears were bleeding in Lenovo Arena.
Then came the play that will dominate the Canadian blogosphere at least until Saturday night when the series resumes.
Slavin, a Team Canada staple and owner of perhaps the most reliable stick among all NHL defensemen, had another rough moment. He tried to clear the puck down the middle and Barbashev intercepted. Blissfully alone, Barbashev missed his first try, retrieved the puck, skated around the net and tried a wraparound on Andersen, as Slavin literally crawled to re-enter the play.
As Anderson fell to control the puck, Barbashev kept poking. Hurricanes captain Jordan Staal fell on top of Andersen. Pavel Dorofeyev also tried to pry it loose. The puck finally did dribble through Andersen and into the net. But referee Jean Hebert was already signaling “incomplete,” which is also the international symbol for no goal.
He ruled that Barbashev was interfering with Andersen’s right to freeze the puck. The Golden Knights doubted, loudly, that Andersen had it under control. At that point, coach John Tortorella had to make a call. Keep playing, and take a 2-2 tie into the final five minutes.. Or challenge it and get it overturned and take what would have looked like a towering 3-2 lead. The problem, of course, is that few calls do get overturned in the postseason, and a bad challenge leaves you shorthanded for two minutes.
That is what happened. The call stood. Carolina went on the power play. But maybe that was part of the calculation, since the Hurricanes were treating their power play like a trip to the DMV. They were 6-for-59 with the man advantage. This reminded some people of the day Flyers coach Fred Shero said Bobby “The Chief” Taylor would start in goal. Bernie Parent had started every game for months. Why would Taylor start this particular time? “Well,” Shero said, “it’s his turn.”
And suddenly it was Carolina’s turn. Here, Shayne Gostisbehere got a chance to shoot it through Vegas’ forest of defenders while Staal and Sebastian Aho were in front of Hart. Staal, 37 and in search of his first Cup since he was with Pittsburgh 17 seasons ago, tipped it past Hart, and it was 3-2, and there was unlimited merriment…..
Until Mark Stone parked in front of Andersen in the final minute of regulation. On the far boards, Tomas Hertl won a puck battle with Slavin and Jordan Martinook, neither of whom lose many. He fed it back to Mitch Marner, Vegas’ Harry Potter throughout these playoffs. Marner shifted and side-stepped and finally saw a lane and shot, and Stone got in the way, and the puck pinballed around and caromed off Slavin’s skate and past Andersen. Overtime, the way it had to be.
It didn’t even take four minutes. Hertl got whistled for tripping Staal, and the Hurricanes, having hit 21 on the last power play, couldn’t wait to double down. Aho won the faceoff, the Hurricanes moved the puck crisply, and Seth Jarvis set up on the left side with his stick in the air, locked and loaded. Gostisbehere sent him the prize and Jarvis blasted it between Hart’s arm and his body. Carolina, the team that couldn’t get past the conference finals, was a 4-3 winner, and is 6-0 in playoff overtime, and now the Cup is up for grabs.
Tortorella was eloquently terse afterward, saying that he would make that challenge “10 times out of 10.” He had been hamstrung since the first period because stalwart defenseman Brayden McNabb was drilled in the visor by Nikolaj Ehlers’ 97-mph shot. The Hurricanes were signaling to the Vegas bench as soon as McNabb went down, and he was immediately taken to the locker room and then to a hospital. That meant Vegas really had only four playoff-ready defensemen, and then overtime complicated things.
Last week, former Blues and Capitals star T.J. Oshie was asked about the Hurricanes and what makes them tick. He said he really didn’t like their “terrible” locker rooms and the inconvenient location of their X-ray machine, but he did respect their endless commitment to the system. But then he asked, “Who are their Hall of Fame players?” Slavin might make it one day because of his defensive mastery, but Aho, their best offensive player historically, has not reached that standard. And that can be a problem when the playoffs get deep. It was a problem for Carolina when it kept running into Steve Stamkos and Victor Hedman and Sasha Barkov and Artemi Panarin in the conference finals. This year Montreal’s best players were too young to outlast the moment, and Carolina won the West finals in five. But now the Hurricanes are dealing with Marner and Stone and Jack Eichel, along with two veteran defense pairs that can finish each other’s sentences. Will the stardom deficit surface again?
That question has to wait until the parking lot empties and the trash is removed and the “tarps off” guys put their shirts back on in Raleigh. Seven games of this, and the whole city might wander off to sea.