After an acceptable, 'treading water' road-heavy October, the Canes have a home-heavy November with 10 home games and only 5 on the road. The team entered the month in okay position needing to capitalize on the home games, start climbing up the standings and put a little distance between themselves and the .500 mark.
It started okay with a home win to open the month, but the train came off the tracks with two poor home losses over the weekend in which they were trounced in terms of the scoreboard and equally significantly in terms of effort and quality of play.
Eric Staal continues to struggle and the frustration is now clearly visible on the ice.
Cam Ward who has been pretty steady most of the season had a rough outing on Sunday and was unable to do much to help an admittedly weak effort by his team on Friday.
Jussi Jokinen is missed with the silver lining being that he could be back sometime this week.
A few positive notes:
Jeff Skinner continues to notch points at a rapid pace.
I thought Derek Joslin played an okay game considering how long he has been on the shelf and I liked the jam he brought on Sunday.
Jokinen should be back soon.
As bad as the outcomes and effort were this weekend, the skid is only 2 games even though it feels longer.
A few comments:
I don't things get noticeably better until Staal finds some kind of rhythm. Two things--
1) He is too big of a part of the team in terms of role, ice time, etc. to be a negative on about a nightly basis;
2) It is becoming painfully clear that he just does not bring enough other stuff (think Rod Brind'Amour) to at least breakeven when he is not scoring. He continues to struggle in the faceoff circle which has his line playing a lot of defense and though he has improved significantly in his own end over the years, he just still is not going to win games by shutting the other team down and scoring a little bit.
A striking data point in this regard is the difference in plus/minus between Sutter and Staal. Sutter is only 3 up in even strength goals and 1 up in assists, but somehow is +17 better in plus/minus arguably playing against tougher competition since Maurice prefers to use Sutter against the other team's top line when he can get it that way.
The forwards need to become more difficult to play against defensively. I would argue that Cam Ward has been decent (not spectacular but decent). While I would not say the blue line has been lights out, minus the Justin Faulk experiment and maybe a slow start by the puck-moving parts of the defense (Kaberle, only recently Pitkananen and an up-and-down McBain) the blue line has been okay to maybe slightly sub-par.
Yet somehow the team ranks 29th in the league in goals allowed per game ahead of only Columbus. It comes down to having, taking and slowing the puck more regularly. Winning more faceoffs would help. Winning more 1-on-1 battles could be a challenge minus a bunch of big physical players, but that is another avenue to playing more with the puck than without it.
Finally, if either or both of this week's road games start slow like this past weekend, I think Maurice needs to give a bit more of a green light to one or all of the physical defensemen to see if they can stir things up a bit. Gleason, Allen, Harrison are all willing but reigned in a bit because of their significant role logging 20 minutes of solid ice time. Joslin is another option.
Here is hoping the team can find more jump on Tuesday and get back to winning!
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Go Canes!
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