As I sit here watching the wonder of playoff hockey launch again with the Carolina Hurricanes, it is that time to assess what went wrong and how it can go better next year.
When you look at raw performance measured in wins, losses and proximity to making the playoffs, it was a real rough year. The team took a significant step backward as compared to 2013-14 going from 83 to 71 points and maybe more significantly going from missing the playoffs by 10 points to a whopping 27. In a nutshell, the team took a big step backward in terms of raw "making the playoffs" production.
So what went wrong? Over the course of the summer, the details of the miss will be sliced and diced dozens of different ways. And when you net 71 points and push much closer to the bottom of the standings than the top, there is plenty of blame to be passed out to the individual players. But from watching the team game in and game out and now having a full season perspective, I summarize the 2014-15 failure like this.
1) The perfect storm to start the season. I am not a big fan of the logic that takes a team's best 50 games, projects it over 82 games and then declares that the team is good enough to make the playoffs. I don't have the time to do it, but I think if you allowed the leniency to pick different stretches of season that favor different teams, you could actually find a way to get about 27-28 of the teams into the playoffs and could also chase all but the top 5-6 out. A typical NHL season is a rollercoaster with streaks both ways. So getting back to the point, the Canes were not lights out the 2nd half, but they were better. The 0-6-2 start followed by another abysmal stretch in November/December after a brief surge dug a huge hole. During this timeframe, the team was hammered across 3 fronts:
1-The team struggled some with a new system as expected. It was not until January/February that the team looked really comfortable in the new coach's system.
2A-Injuries did hurt. Jordan Staal is an important 20 minutes/game because of his ability to line up against the other team's best and eat up many of the hard minutes often with a breakeven line. And though the other injuries were shorter-lived, playing minus Skinner and EStaal in October left the team real thin at forward.
2B-And that leads perfectly into 2B which is that the Canes just are not deep enough to pull players from the system and play at the same level. Riley Nash surged early and Victor Rask capitalized on the opportunity, but the team overall was significantly undermanned and it showed minus a couple key players at the top of the lineup.
2) The team was better once it righted the ship a bit adjusting to the new system and also getting Jordan Staal back in the lineup. But even this better version of the team was marginal. So even with key players healthy, it did not work. Why not? It is never as simple as 1 thing, but I really think you can pin most of it on the across-the-board underperformance by the top half of the roster at forward. I would not say that the goaltending was great. Khudobin took a step down from a very good 2013-14 season, but Ward improved from a real rough 2013-14. But it was decent and nowhere close to the biggest problem. And defensively, especially when you consider the budget and personnel, I think the defense was at least good enough. The team finished 18th in goals allowed and that was after a bit of a dip when keys to the 1st (Sekera) and 2nd/3rd (Gleason) pairings were traded and replaced largely by auditioning AHLers. This result becomes even more acceptable when you consider the lack of budget spent on the blue line. With a top 4 that averaged only about $3.5M/player and bargain basement players filling the other slots. When you compare that to the Canes offensive woes, especially 5-on-5 and look at the underperformers, I think you have identified the biggest deviation from the projects and plan. By contrast the top 4 forwards (EStaal, Semin, JStaal, Skinner) averaged almost $7M/player, and not 1 of them matched what you would have hoped for offensive production. Semin's struggles are well-documented. For the Canes to be good, I think bare minimum/the team could recover numbers for 82-game production had to be 25/30 for 55 points with an ideal target more like 65-70 points. Instead, Semin netted 6+13=19 in 57 games. That puts the team 15-16 goals short. The story gets only a tiny bit better when you look at the other top forwards. Jordan Staal's strength is his ability to eat up the hard minutes defensively, but even still his 40ish point pace after returning from injury is light especially in terms of goals. I would have for something like 20 goals which puts the team minus another 8-9 goals (prorated for his partial season). EStaal closed the gap late pushing to 54 points which is short by less, but he just was not 1 of the best players on the ice on enough nights especially during the time when the team was falling out of the playoff chase. And last of all, Jeff Skinner took a step back offensively with only 31 points, and I would not chalk it up to the fact that he was finally making tremendous strides defensively. Even with an improved middle of the pack power play, the Canes finished a dismal 27th in goals scored. I would not go so far as to say that the secondary scoring was phenomenal, but when you try to find the goals needed to get from 27th in the league up to 12th-15th, it is pretty easy to find the missing totals in the 4 top players noted above.
Recognizing that Canes GM Ron Francis will be budget-limited this summer with falling attendance, I guess the positive spin is that there is significant room for improvement from obvious sources. I guess the negative spin is that this set of players seems to be trending downward heading into the summer. Eric Staal did seem to get better at least scoring-wise late, so perhaps starting healthy and being in a contract year is enough to reverse his falling scoring totals. Jordan Staal similarly could rebound with a healthy summer. The other 2 are more questionable. Alexander Semin is not that many years removed from being an elite NHL player, but he is now 2 years deep in a slump, looking mostly worse not better as the season wore on and looking like he needed counseling more than health or a new stick or something easier to fix when he did his exit interview. And without going too deep into my long-running mantra that Jeff Skinner is more valuable as trade bait for a better 2-way player than on the roster, Skinner just does not look enough better defensively often enough, even the thing you could count on (raw scoring) was lost in 2014-15. I will save my thoughts on what to do with the roster and specifically these players for another day, but at a very basic level, if you force me to narrow down the culprits for 2014-15 to a couple, I pick the challenging start caused by multiple factors and the across the board underperformance by the top forwards.
What say you Canes fan? Do you agree with my top 2? What would be your #3? Is there any hope that this problem solves itself for 2014-15 and suddenly the same roster is much better?
Twitter=@CarolinaMatt63
Go Canes!