The Carolina Hurricanes GM and Coach had some kind words about the Canadiens ahead of the start of the Eastern Conference Final.
As is customary, the GM and coach of all the teams that made the final four had a scheduled media availability before the start of their third-round series. On Wednesday, Eric Tulsky and Rod Brind’Amour from the Carolina Hurricanes spoke to the media early in the afternoon, while Kent Hughes and Trevor Letowski from the Montreal Canadiens met the press later in the day.
When Tulsky was asked about how the Canadiens operated their rebuild, he said:
Yeah, I mean, he’s done a great job. The team has come a long way; they’ve got a really strong young core, and they’re well set up to obviously have a great run this year and set up to keep getting better from there. Very impressed with what they’ve done, what they’ve put together. It’s going to be a tough round for us.
That’s a fair assessment, especially when considering that most pundits considered the Canadiens’ window of contention hadn’t opened yet, and here they are in the Eastern Conference Final, just four wins away from playing for the Stanley Cup.
As for being well set up for the future, I believe their goaltending duo says a lot about how well Hughes and his team have planned. The new regime may not have drafted Jakub Dobes, but they did recognize he was a better option than Cayden Primeau, and they now have him competing with Jacob Fowler, who was the heir apparent. Up front, they still have exciting prospects coming through the ranks in Alexander Zharovsky and Michael Hage, and they also have good blueliners waiting for their opportunity.
As for Brind’Amour, he was asked what had made the Canadiens’ power play so successful against the Buffalo Sabres, and he explained:
Well, I don’t know if that’s just in the playoffs, but they’ve been dynamic. They have dynamic players. All five of those guys in their own right are elite at what they do [Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield, Juraj Slafkovsky, Ivan Demidov, and Lane Hutson]. You put them together in those roles, and I think they feed off each other really well.”
You just watch, they’re in synch. I think a power play is about skill, and they have it. So that’s a definite concern.
While the Canadiens have had a good success rate on the power play in these playoffs at 25%, they’ll have their work cut out for them against Carolina. The Canes have the second-best penalty kill with a 95% success rate over the eight games they played. However, things have not gone as smoothly on the power play for Brind’Amour’s men; with the man-advantage, they’ve only scored on 13.5% of their opportunities.
It will be interesting to see just how big a role special teams play in the third round. Will penalties be called consistently? It seems like the referees struggled with that in the first two rounds, and it would be great if the quality of the on-ice product weren’t affected by them.
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