There’s just something about the playoffs where the Carolina Hurricanes, no matter the round or circumstances, end up playing These Guys Again.
Some of that’s a function of making the playoffs seven years in a row and winning at least one series. You’re bound to see the same faces over and over again.
Devils and Capitals (and Rangers and Islanders and Bruins) and Panthers, oh my.
Would it kill the hockey gods to throw up, say, the Philadelphia Flyers at some point? Or bestow the greatest gift of all after 19 years without, one of those everything-goes-to-11 series against the Montreal Canadiens?
Instead, thanks to the Florida Panthers’ Game 7 win at the Toronto Maple Leafs on Sunday, we’re getting a rematch of the 2023 Eastern Conference Final, a sweep memorable for being decided by a total of four goals over 17 periods of hockey.
A few things have changed since then, and not just that the Panthers have now won the same number of Stanley Cups as the Hurricanes.
Andrei Svechnikov is healthy. Frederik Andersen is at the top of his game. The Hurricanes appear to have a functioning power play. They’re a deeper, bigger team at forward than they were two years ago, taking care of business with a pair of gentleman’s sweeps to start the postseason, clearly the better team in both series and playing like it.
Perhaps beyond all of that, they appear to have learned something from their eliminations at the hands of the Rangers (2024) and Panthers (2023) in particular, something that will no doubt play very heavily into this series as they look for their first conference-finals win — game and series both — since 2006.
Timo Meier tried. Tom Wilson tried. But the Hurricanes never allowed themselves to be goaded into penalties or, worse, losing their heads. No one has been able to get into their kitchen this postseason the way Brad Marchand once did so effectively. Not even Meier taking a subtle, plausibly deniable run at Andersen. Not even Wilson mocking the storm surge, an odd choice of smack talk that was not surprisingly ineffective.
The Hurricanes have been a calmly disciplined team this postseason, not withstanding Jordan Martinook being sent to the box for plowing over Wilson after he poked at Andersen, the kind of thing Wilson and Meier routinely got away with. It’s not so much that they have otherwise avoided retaliation penalties; it’s that they don’t even appear to be thinking about it.
Combine that with their relentless efficiency with the puck, wearing down teams until they wither and capitulate, and there’s a mental toughness to the team that hasn’t been there in years past. The Hurricanes have outscored the opposition 16-6 in the third period and overtime, and while five of those were empty-net goals, it’s still an impressive measure of the way the Hurricanes push teams until they break.
For the Capitals, it was a hurdle they could never overcome. Washington coach Spencer Carbery spoke at length after Game 5 about how difficult the Hurricanes made it on his team, and his not-even-grudging respect for the way they play. In the often-macho hockey world, it was the ultimate tip of the cap.
“They are just relentless with their pressure and their ability to break plays up with their sticks,” Carbery said Thursday night. “There’s no team in the league like it. It doesn’t mean they’re going to win the Cup. But they absolutely are right there. They’re a handful. They’ve learned now how to win this time of year. They don’t get rattled when the game stays tight and could go either way. But you can just tell the experience and the calmness of their group through various points in that series.
“It’s a great series for us. I hate, hate, hate — and I won’t be able to let it go for a long while — losing a series to them, but it’s a great learning experience to feel what that felt like. Because it was suffocating. Guys had no space to get shots off in that series. We have multiple guys sitting at like two or three shots in five games that had 30 goals in the regular season. They make it really, really challenging on you. They check well. Their sticks are good. They skate. Worthy opponent. Really good team.”
The one thing that hasn’t changed since 2023 — and it will be the preferred talking point for the same pundits who have deemed the Hurricanes’ high-octane, shoot-and-shoot-again style “boring” — is Sergei Bobrovsky.
The Florida goalie bedeviled the Hurricanes in 2023, essentially the margin of victory personified in all four games. That will still be a challenge, in a way Logan Thompson was not in the second round. But the Hurricanes found a way past Jacob Markstrom in the first round, and he posted far better numbers in that series than Bobrovsky has so far — and no one in the postseason has had better numbers than Andersen.
It’s not a stretch to say the Hurricanes have a goaltending advantage coming into this series. It’ll have to stay that way if they’re going to come out of it.
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Luke DeCock
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Sports columnist Luke DeCock joined The News & Observer in 2000 and has covered seven Final Fours, the Summer Olympics, the Super Bowl and the Carolina Hurricanes’ Stanley Cup. He is a past president of the U.S. Basketball Writers Association, was the 2020 winner of the National Headliner Award as the country’s top sports columnist and has twice been named North Carolina Sportswriter of the Year.