Carolina Hurricanes’ success at home was abruptly halted on Monday night, their first loss since the season at PNC Arena in 2022, ending their season in the second round.
After such dominance in front of the home crowd against Boston and New York, the loss of Carolina 6-2 in Game 7 will be a difficult pill to swallow. Strong play was again absent, more bad luck hit their crease with another injury in the middle of the match, and another big hit by Jacob Trumpet became a key moment that will not win him fans in Carolina.
And now, again, this is a group that will go out of season, wondering what the hell they need to do differently to really break through as a top team in their conference.
“It’s always hard, maybe harder because I had the feeling we were in a different place this year. We were right there,” said Canes coach Rod Brind’Amour. “It makes it a little harder. And it’s another chance, I don’t mean lost, but it’s another year that you don’t have that chance. Still, I’m very proud of the band. A phenomenal year.”
The New York Rangers, on the other hand, overcame some of the key figures for the entire season and with a huge online game and timely attack from their top players, will return to the Eastern Conference finals for the first time since 2015. And they will receive and a chance for revenge because they will play with the same opponent they last drew with when they were here – although Tampa Bay Lightning will arrive as consecutive champions in 2022.
The Rangers are in their worst ordeal so far and will not have such an advantage in the fold. While most of New York’s playoff games this season were against the second and third teams of the other team, they will now face Andrei Vassilevsky.
But before we turn the page and focus on the Eastern final, let’s look back at some of what we saw in Game 7 between New York and Carolina.
Carolina’s strong play finally caught up with them
The Hurricanes finished the regular season in 13th place in the league standings, clicking 22 percent, but the situation has been weakening for some time. From March 1 until the end of the regular season – a period of 30 games – Carolina’s strength is ranked 26th with 15.6 percent. In their last 10 matches, they have made only three of 24 PP attempts.
So the fact that Carolina continued to have problems with the men’s advantage in the playoffs is not shocking in this context, but it is still hard to believe that a team with their offensive talent can not find a way to correct. In games 6 and 7 with a chance to close the Rangers, Carolina scored once in a power game with seven chances and that was the obvious difference in Game 7. The Canes had their shots here and where the Rangers went 2-for-3, the Canes did 1-for-3. 4, with the only result reducing the deficit from four goals to three with only half a period left.
Too little, too late.
Their only other goal in the series was in game 5 and that was the winner of the game from the stick of Teuvo Teravainen.
As all series did, the Canes had a clear 5-on-5 advantage, with 29 more strike attempts and seven more high-risk chances than New York, but Shesterkin was a spike and reversed that advantage. That’s what he did throughout the season for the Rangers, who played more often during games.
Carolina needed to gain better control of the man’s advantage, open Shesterkin with royal passes, and simply reach higher quality areas more often for her strikes. They managed to strike only five shots in four 5-on-4 options and received only two high-risk glances. Since your season is online and you have enough chances for a powerful game, Canes felt too comfortable with outside kicks.
It’s not a recipe for success against the best goalkeeper in the NHL this season.
Shesterkin against Vasilevski
If the last sentence was controversial at all, then the next round will show how the best two goalkeepers are performing at the moment. Andrei Vassilevski is the established “best goalkeeper in the world”, who was absolutely unbeaten in the playoffs to win the last three seasons, although he was not a finalist for Vezina in 2021-22. Shesterkin is the next, this year’s favorite of Vezina, who himself won five consecutive elimination matches in the playoffs with a save rate of .930.
In Game 7 against Hurricanes, Shesterkin was his distinctive self, and while the end result was a blow to New York, there were certainly times when Carolina could get on the board first or come back into the game when it was early enough to not to be still out of range.
His first period was especially important when Shesterkin faced 16 shots and rejected them all. It was Carolina’s best 20 minutes of the night and their inability to score a goal there really left them in a difficult hole.
“He’s been doing it all year. Nothing surprises me,” Rangers coach Gerard Galant said of his goalkeeper. “We’re not perfect, but we’re finding ways to win.”
Shesterkin was a master and will now face the master in his position in the conference finals. The advantage that New York kept in the door in its first two rounds will no longer exist. Welcome to the conference finals. Welcome to the jungle.
Jacob Trumpet came to the fore again
While Adam Fox will get a stellar attitude towards the next round, and rightly so, Jacob Trumpet is a major factor for the Rangers on the blue line.
With an average of over 25 minutes of play, Trumpet recorded 24 minutes of ice in Game 7, leading the game with five blocked shots and two recorded hits. It is this physical nature that will be useful in the next round against a fresher Lightning team. None of the Rangers is close to the number of hits that Trumpet has thrown in these playoffs.
But his style is controversial from time to time, and the chance of hanging is always just around the corner. Trumpet had a few of those moments in those playoffs.
Just six days before match 7 against Carolina, Trumpet equalized Max Domi in game 4 in a shot that some said should have led to extra discipline, but was not called as a penalty. Trumpet eventually escaped any punishment here.
In Round 1, Trumpet’s strike against Sidney Crosby knocked out the Penguins’ superstar from Game 5 and he had to drop out of Game 6. Although there was no penalty in this game either, the Penguins thought there was intent here, and also called out the elbow He blew the trumpet earlier in the game against Jake Gunzel.
So in match 7 against Carolina, Trumpet’s strike again became a key turning point and a controversial moment for some.
With the Rangers leading by just one goal in the middle of the first period, Trumpet went straight through Seth Jarvis when the rookie striker – and key scorer in Carolina’s power play – tried to play in the offensive zone. Jarvis was left in trouble and crawled back onto the bench while the Rangers played differently. And as Jarvis struggled to get off the ice, his deputy jumped the bench early in despair in defense and imposed too many men on a penalty against Carolina.
The Rangers scored in the ensuing powerful game to find a two-goal lead from which they never returned.
“It summarizes everything in this shift. (Nekas) skipping, he doesn’t realize Jarvi’s toast,” Brind’Amour said. “It was a heavy blow in this match.”
Although there was some online debate about the legality of the game and understandable disappointment that Jarvis was in such rough shape and could not return to the game because the game in question went unpunished, the reminder of Rule 48 shows that, according to the book The trumpet did nothing illegal here. The relevant part of this rule reads …
Illegal check on the head: A blow resulting in contact with the opponent’s head, where the head was the main point of contact and such head contact was avoided, is not permitted. In determining whether contact with the opponent’s head has been avoided, account shall be taken of the circumstances of the impact, including the following:
(i) Whether the player attempted to strike straight through the opponent’s body and the head was not “selected” as a result of bad weather, poor approach angle or unnecessary extension of the body upwards or outwards.
There will be no extra discipline here and you can bet that Trumpet will be someone to watch in the next round against Lightning.
Assessing a series of Anti Raanta playoffs
Absolutely brutal luck with a goalkeeper injury bit Carolina Hurricanes at the end of this season. For a team that has been building its skills base for several years and has always refrained somewhat from what they had – or didn’t have – on the net, this season had to be different.
That’s why they brought in Frederick Andersen for a seemingly bargain price of $ 4.5 million, a slight reduction in his salary from his days in Toronto. Andersen completed the entire regular season and was firmly among the top five players in his position.
But an injury at the end of the regular season lasted two rounds of the playoffs and Andersen was never strong enough to return for the Canes. He was still watching from the press box in Game 7, which meant that the second and third strings were tasked with confronting Shesterkin’s magic. And Carolina needed both.
When we look back on this series, the difference in goalkeepers will be the focus and much of it will be because Shesterkin really won the accolades he received for such a stellar performance. But Raanta deserves no contempt for his performance – on the contrary, he gave Canes everything you could hope for from a backup put in such a long and difficult situation.
Raanta stopped 16 of the 18 shots he faced on Monday night, but an injury in the middle of the match forced him to …
Add Comment