For the first time this postseason, the Carolina Hurricanes face elimination Tuesday night, and this group’s record under such circumstances is decidedly mixed.
On the good side of the ledger, there’s the 2019 first round against the Washington Capitals, when the Hurricanes won Game 6 at home and Game 7 on the road (in double overtime) to knock off the defending Stanley Cup champions.
The last two times the Hurricanes’ season was on the line, they went relatively meekly: A 4-0 home loss to the Boston Bruins in 2019 to get swept out of the conference finals, a 5-1 loss to the Bruins in the Toronto bubble last August to lose in five games.
So now they face the same situation — at home this time, down 3-1 to the Tampa Bay Lightning, in Game 5 — albeit in a series that has had a very different character than either against the Bruins. As a franchise, the Hurricanes have a 9-6 record in elimination games since moving to North Carolina. They’ve twice come back to win down 3-2, but never 3-1.
“Obviously we dug ourselves a hole and it’s time to dig out of it,” Hurricanes forward Jordan Martinook said Tuesday morning. “It’s time to treat every shift like it’s the most important shift and do everything you can to keep moving forward here.”
If anything, this series has been closer to the Washington series, which included two overtime games against the defending champs. That series had a couple blowouts, which this one has not, and the home team won every game in that series until Game 7 while the road team has already won three times in this series.
Still, the Hurricanes outscored the Capitals 21-20 over the seven games; the Lightning were up 12-9 on aggregate through four games of this series and the first three games were all one-goal games, one decided in overtime.
As was the case in the first round against the Nashville Predators, there hasn’t been much separating these teams on the scoresheet, even if Tampa Bay’s power play has been the biggest factor, exponentially so, in the series on the ice.
All of which is to say, if the Hurricanes looked like the more experienced postseason team against the Predators, especially in Games 5 and 6, the Lightning has looked that way in the second round.
That didn’t happen overnight; the Lightning’s core group is playing its 18th playoff series over the past eight years. This core Hurricanes group would only be considered inexperienced in the playoffs against a team like that. It is playing its seventh series in three years, has a Game 7 road win and two sweeps to its credit and is 5-4 in overtime. It’s no longer a bunch of first-timers; the rhythms and swings of the playoffs — like facing elimination at home — should be nothing new.
Not that there are any guarantees with that — Tampa is still only two seasons removed from being swept out of the first round by the Columbus Blue Jackets as the best regular-season team in the NHL — but it can potentially make a difference in games like this. It certainly did in Game 4, when the Lightning weren’t rattled when they fell behind 4-2 and the Hurricanes were when Tampa stormed back to make it 5-4 in a flash with three goals in less than five minutes, and then quickly 6-4.
The next best thing to avoiding elimination games is winning them; the Hurricanes had a chance to bolster their resume in that regard Tuesday night, a logical and realistic next step in this team’s postseason progression — if it’s going to continue to progress this spring, that is.