Posted: 5/26/2009 by Brian LeBlanc
The Carolina Hurricanes' magical run is over. An underdog in every series they played in this year's NHL playoffs, the Canes finally met their match in the Eastern Conference final as they were swept by the Pittsburgh Penguins after a 4-1 loss in Game 4. While the Canes are understandably upset with their failure to capture the Stanley Cup, they have nothing to be ashamed of after defying the odds and putting the naysayers who left the team for dead on the side of the road in their place over and over again. After the emotion of the series dies off, the Canes will see this season for what it was: an incredible journey that led them to heights no one expected.
We're back in the saddle again, after TZ ably filled in for me on Saturday. As you'd might expect, the man who's 1-20 (or so) this season delivered again, and the Canes stare at a 3-0 hole going into tonight's game 4. Nothing new for a team that's essentially played playoff games for three months, starting in late February when they made their charge from out of the playoffs into the sixth slot in the conference.
So as Taylor said, you get treated to more wit (ha!) and wisdom (HA!) from the guy who dreams up forechecking schemes, and the vox populi will check in with his own observations...
Pregame (TZ): I don't have high hopes for tonight. That doesn't mean the Canes can't win, but they are a decided underdog. The Pens are faster, more talented, and a bunch more confident.
But regardless of what happens tonight, let me be very clear, this run has been AWESOME. It has invigorated the entire area. Its so neat to see a community united with flags waving all over the place. It's brought back memories of three years ago, and hopefully, it's made the Canes contenders again.
(Remember, they're still a year ahead of schedule. They only make the finals in Winter Olympic years.)
As you might expect, lots of excitement in the stands tonight. The fans will be into this one as long as the Canes give them something to cheer for, and the "Let's Go Canes" chants started during warmups and continued through the leadup to game time.
Roster notes: Tuomo Ruutu (lower body) will be out of tonight's game, still nursing that lower body injury he suffered in game 1. Patrick Dwyer will take his place in the lineup. Also, Anton Babchuk will see his first action in this series, with Frank Kaberle a healthy scratch tonight.
Here we go...
Start 1st: Paul Maurice has also adjusted the lines for tonight. We'll update them as they come out, but the Whitney-Cullen-LaRose line that was so deadly late in the regular season is back together.
Lines:
Samsonov-Staal-Cole
Whitney-Cullen-LaRose
Bayda-Jokinen-Eaves
Dwyer-Brind'Amour-Walker
1:36 1st: Finally, Eric Staal is on the score sheet, and you know what happens when he scores a goal. Staal put his feet to work behind the net off a broken play, and Erik Cole's touch pass found its way onto Staal's stick. Pens goalie Marc-Andre Fleury wasn't quite set, and Staal snuck the puck into the net a split second before Fleury got his skate over to cover the post.
3:00 1st: The fans have been up and cheering for a few minutes now, and they really got loud when Dennis Seidenberg leveled former Cane Craig Adams in front of the bench. The Canes seem to have learned their lesson from Saturday, when they let the foot off the gas after Matt Cullen's first period goal and served the game up to the Penguins on a silver platter.
4:15 1st (TZ): Welcome to the series Mr Staal! Cowherrrrr power, fighting, skating fast, and scoring! This is new....
(BL: That's
Raleigh's own Bill Cowher to you, sir.)
5:20 1st: Cam Ward stones Ruslan Fedotenko on a partial breakaway. Not that he's been to blame for anything this series, but a stand-on-his-head performance tonight would be well-timed.
8:21 1st: The aforementioned Fedotenko strikes again. A point shot from Phillippe Boucher went straight through to the side of the net, and Dennis Seidenberg missed Fedotenko sneaking into the right post. Fedotenko tapped the shot into the net from no angle. Seidenberg could have been a little tighter, but in his defense he probably would have tipped the puck past Ward himself if he hadn't jumped out of the way.
10:30 1st: Samsonov nearly had his line's second of the night in front of the net with Fleury down, but he kicked the puck wide of the net and the Penguins dodged danger while killing an Evgeni Malkin penalty for holding the stick.
12:00 1st: Nothing doing on the power play, and the Canes never even got a shot off. Their failure to convert with the extra skater has got to be the most frustrating thing about this team. We know the defense is a bunch of journeymen who might or might not be effective on any given night; the Canes, however, have the shooters to convert on the power play, and they never shoot the puck.
14:45 1st: Jordan Staal just flattened Scott Walker along the far boards. The Canes haven't needed to play physical so far in this series, but the Penguins have cranked up the physical intensity tonight and the Canes need to match it.
18:31 1st: A terrible break for the Canes has the Penguins up by one. Maxime Talbot took a harmless-looking shot from just inside the Canes' blue line, but the puck bounced off Anton Babchuk's stick and knuckleballed its way over Ward's glove and into the net. If it wasn't for bad luck...
19:35 1st (TZ): So much for that momentum at the jump. These "near the end of period" goals are such backbreakers.
(BL: Especially on a shot like that. The Canes now get a gift power play on a questionable roughing call to Malkin, but they need to make it count.)
End 1st: As usual, the Canes give up a late goal, their third in this series. It was a gift to the Penguins, but it counts just the same and the Canes now need to battle back yet again. Shots in the period were 9-5 Penguins, although the scoring chances seemed a little more even than that.
1:35 2nd: Another power play goes by the wayside with no damage done, and the crowd is starting to get a bit nervous. The Canes can't keep letting these opportunities going by the wayside, or else they're under an hour from seeing their season end.
3:45 2nd: For the problems the Canes have had while a man up, they're solid while down a man. Eric Staal just about willed a goal into the net while shorthanded, on what was probably the Canes' best chance of the night.
6:30 2nd: The Penguins are having their way with the Canes right now, as they've taken all kinds of momentum off that power play and have been controlling the puck deep in Carolina territory, forcing the Canes to make halfhearted clearing attempts and not giving the home team much to work with.
9:56 2nd: After a really stupid retaliatory tripping penalty to Dennis Seidenberg, taking Sidney Crosby's legs out from under him after Crosby rammed Seidenberg into the boards, Bill Guerin matched Seidenberg in the dumb penalty department by holding Chad LaRose after LaRose hit the net on a backhand off a shorthanded partial breakaway.
11:20 2nd: Staal just missed his second of the night at the end of a long shift, hitting the outside of the net and missing the target by only a few inches. He's done everything he can to keep the Canes in the series tonight, answering the critics who were wondering where he had disappeared to.
11:45 2nd (TZ): Gotta say, Staal is skating his heart out. He's going straight to the net every time he gets the puck.
(BL: See? I wouldn't lie.)
12:10 2nd: And yet again, the Penguins make the Canes pay for a questionable decision at the offensive blue line. Sidney Crosby pickpocketed Babchuk at the right point, and Crosby's speed turned the 2-on-2 into an easy tip-in from Bill Guerin. Ward had no chance, as has been the case most of the time in this series.
13:40 2nd (TZ): So Brian, who ya got the Wings or Pens? This game and series is so over.
Turning the puck over to Crosby is no different than assisted suicide. Okay maybe there's a slight difference. Whatever happened to Jack Kevorkian?
(BL: You know it's a lost cause when the Jack Kevorkian references come out. And the way both teams are playing, I have no idea who wins that series. Get back to me in three months when the NHL finally gets around to starting the series.)
15:20 2nd: My wife just admitted that she's switched over to TLC. Not quite losing Walter Cronkite's support of the Vietnam War, but noteworthy nonetheless.
17:20 2nd (TZ): One channel away is Driving Miss Daisy. Now you've lost me too....
(BL: Excuse me while I channel my inner Don Meredith.
Turn out the lights, the party's over...)
18:10 2nd: The Canes managed to not score with the puck sitting on a platter in the low slot and Fleury completely out of position. Ouch.
End 2nd (TZ): Okay there's only one thing left to do to try and turn this thing around.... me leaving the building. Bye bye.
(BL: The man is taking one for the team. Gotta give him some credit. The Canes outshot the Penguins 16-10 in the period to take a 21-19 lead overall, but the Penguins are twenty minutes of keepaway from advancing to their second straight Stanley Cup final.)
Start 3rd: Give the fans credit -- they're not any quieter with their team 20 minutes away from elimination. They're doing their best to keep the Canes in the game. Of course, it's up to the guys in red sweaters to do their part too.
3:05 3rd: The Canes have had their chances, with three shots in the early stages of the period, but yet again their passing is just a hair off and it's the difference between an open net and a shot that goes wide. Frustrating, but completely predictable given how this series has gone.
6:56 3rd: We're thirteen minutes from the end of the season, and perhaps fittingly the Canes squandered another power play chance. They've scored one power play in the last seven games. If you're looking for an easy answer to the question "what happened?", there it is.
8:33 3rd: Erik Cole has no luck against the Penguins at all. Malkin just kneed him in the head accidentally while Cole was falling to the ice after a check. He stayed on the bench, but what is it with Canes players taking head shots when playing Pittsburgh? It's getting somewhat ridiculous.
12:55 3rd: The Canes' PK has yet to let them down, even killing off a two-man advantage for thirty seconds or so and generating another scoring chance off the stick of Eric Staal, who lost the puck off his stick just before he fired from the top of the near circle.
18:50 3rd: It's all over but the shouting now. Craig Adams has put the nail in his former team's coffin by scoring into the empty net.
End 3rd: A late-period flurry for the Canes resulted in absolutely nothing on the scoreboard, and the Canes' season ended with the home crowd cheering them off the ice while the Penguins celebrated their second straight Prince of Wales Trophy and the accompanying berth in the Stanley Cup Final. Shots in the third were 10-6 Hurricanes, and while it's little consolation they outshot the Penguins 31-25 in the game. Back with more from the locker room in a few.
Postgame: It was a predictably somber Hurricanes dressing room after the game. As you'd might expect, the sting of losing four straight to be swept out of the playoffs hurts a bit more when a chance to play for the Stanley Cup is on the line, but more than that, the Canes were completely and utterly spent. It wasn't that they played poorly against the Penguins -- for long stretches, especially in the second period of tonight's game, the Canes were the better team -- but Paul Maurice admitted after the game that the Canes were gassed. The first two rounds had taken so much out of them that when they needed to go to the well again in round three, the well was pretty much dry.
That's not to say that this season was a disaster. Far from it; while the Canes said after the game that they feel disappointed and incomplete in not winning the Stanley Cup, anyone who had been watching this team for the last four months or so can readily admit that this was a team that defied any reasonable expectations. I said to another media member after the game that if someone bet me $50 on March 1 that the Hurricanes would be playing on May 26, I would have taken that bet and my wife would have been somewhat upset at blowing fifty hard-earned bucks.
The emotions are too raw to really get a read on the team tonight. That's understandable, and we'll find out in a few days what injuries were being hidden, what players really thought of how the season went, how they were able to tap the well as frequently as they did late in the season, and so on. Those will come. For now, while the team is upset that it didn't get the job done, the fans can take solace in the fact that the Hurricanes left every ounce of effort out there on the ice tonight, and it's to their credit that this pesky bunch never gave up the ghost.
It was a heck of a ride, and you'd better believe the hunger will be in that locker room in the first week of October when they get back to work again.
Click for locker room audio from
Eric Staal,
Chad LaRose and
Scott Walker. Paul Maurice's press conference is attached.
We'll have more postmortems posted here later this week, including a ten-question (or more?) Q&A. If you have a question, feel free to
drop me an email and I'll do my best to answer it.
For the last time this season, keep shooting 'em straight...
Hear the Audio!