Carolina Hurricanes Lose Barnburner to Nashville Predators, Fall 6-5 in Overtime
You'd think that scoring five goals would be enough to win you just about any game in the NHL, but that's certainly not been the case for the Carolina Hurricanes this season.
In fact, five goals wouldn't have been enough to win nine different games this season, nearly one-third of the Canes' games so far.
So while putting pucks into the net hasn't been too big of an issue for the Hurricanes — rank in the top-10 in goals scored (99) — they've been very bad at keeping pucks out of their own net.
In tonight's 6-5 overtime loss to the Nashville Predators, Hurricanes coach Rod Brind'Amour chocked a lot of it up to poor play.
"We just didn't have any jump and you could tell," Brind'Amour said. "We were just late on everything and keeping up with lines, not tight on anything. So that's why it looked like that. I give the guys credit for trying, but I could just tell we were a little off. Not sharp and a little fatigued.
"We didn't quite keep up. You can tell by all the rush opportunities that we were giving up. That never happens. We were just soft. Give them a lot of credit. They played there game. We still had a chance to win it, but it really wasn't like we needed to do."
While a lot of the team's issues have come from poor showings on defense where they've surrendered an absurd amount of high-danger chances, the truth of the matter, whether the head coach will say it or not, has been the fact that the goaltending just hasn't been there.
It's been a tough stretch for Antti Raanta. There's no way around that.
"You can struggle as a forward or defenseman and nobody really even knows," Brind'Amour said. "You guys don't even talk about it very much because you've got other guys covering for you. It's just a hard position to play. It's not on him. Like I said, we were not good tonight. We weren't terrible. We had a good situation there, but everything was just a little soft, a little late, a little too easy to play against tonight."
He's been fighting it for a while now and tonight was yet another culmination of that struggle.
Raanta allowed six goals on 31 shots and while his support could have been better, there was another save or two to have been had tonight.
In his 14 starts, Raanta has only had above a 0.900 save percentage four times. It's been tough for him and it's not like he's just going about in nonchalantly.
He's taking every loss hard and you can tell it's weighing on him. Goaltending is such a mental battle and when that confidence slips, it's hard to get it back, but the only way out is for him to keep battling.
He'll probably get some extended time off without another back-to-back until Dec, 27/28 so perhaps he can use this time to just reset.
We've seen how good of a goaltender he can be, he just needs to find his game again.
On the flipside, the Canes' offense continues to produce.
The power play converted twice, with both Stefan Noesen and Tony DeAngelo getting on the board, and Jalen Chatfield, Sebastian Aho and Martin Necas all grabbed 5v5 goals.
"We're finding our groove, getting things as well as we can," Noesen said about the power play success. "Just figuring out the groups as we go."
The Hurricanes were also good with the response goals, scoring within the same minute as the Predators did on multiple occasions.
Those are good building blocks for the Canes to continue to count on as the season goes along.
Now, after a six-game road trip and a back-to-back, the Canes can finally get a day off at home to reset and prepare for the remainder of the month.
"It's not been an ideal schedule, but everyone has tough parts of their schedule," Brind'Amour said. "I just think that ours hit us at the start of the season with a couple of really weird road trips and then a game tonight. Everybody has to go through it. But I hope they get to see some family, refresh and hopefully come back with a little more fight to our game."
