Saturday night is 1 of those momentum defining games for the Carolina Hurricanes. The game partially sets the mojo and mood heading in a 5-day layoff. With a win, the Canes finish off a 4-game road trip that saw some struggles with 4 points in 4 games which would be a victory production-wise. With a regulation loss, the word you keep from the previous sentence is "struggles," as the Canes will have collected only 2 points in 4 games. I said before the current 7-game stretch with 6 on the road started that 8 point would be a good and acceptable version of treading water. The Canes have that already. But after getting 6 points in the 1st 3 games with wins, the momentum coming out of the back end of the trip would certainly shift back toward negative heading into the mostly off week.
So with a day off since the previous game and nothing else on the schedule until next Friday, this is 1 of those empty the tank games. No looking forward to getting home. No checking the standings and feeling generally good about current position. It is about finding the 1st complete game in 4 tries and finding a way to win with it. If it takes 28 minutes of Justin Faulk and/or Andrej Sekera, so be it. If it takes stacking a couple top lines with scoring talent and double-shifting late in the game, so be it. If it takes a goalie standing on his head in the 1st period to fight through another slow start, that is disappointing, but it needs to happen.
In an ideal world maybe the trip would finish against a lesser team where a solid effort was more certain to be rewarded, but it does not. The trip finishes up against a good and very underrated hockey team in the Phoenix Coyotes. The Coyotes beat the Canes 5-3 in Raleigh in October, are 12-2-2 at home and come in with a solid 18-8-5 record that in the better conference has them right on the cut line for the playoffs. The Coyotes are a balanced and opportunistic bunch offensively with decent scoring depth, offense from the back end and a good power play. If the Canes let them tilt the ice early and control the puck in the offense zone, it is unlikely that luck or a Herculean goalie effort will be enough to emerge from the 1st period unscathed.
Keys to the game from the Canes side:
1) 60 minutes and no slow start. I think it was on Twitter and not in a blog where I said that a key difference between Cam Ward and Justin Peters right now as relates to fit for the Canes play is that they are opposites in terms of level of play over the course of a game. Justin Peters very consistently starts well and plays his best hockey early and maybe fades a bit as the game goes on. With as strong as he has been overall of late, it is not at all like his 2nd and 3rd periods are a problem per se, but I think I would rate the 1st period as his best. Ward is the complete opposite. He has struggled mightily in the 1st period and tends to get better after he settles in. The problem is that with the Canes regressing back to slow starts of late, the mix of lackluster Canes 1st periods and Ward's inability to hold the fort under duress early has too regularly led to early 1-goal or even 2-goal deficits. Playing behind is incredibly difficult in the NHL. Because of this, I continue to like Peters as the best chance to win a game right now and therefore the starter, but regardless of who starts in net, it is vital that the Canes find a better start and a better 60 minutes of hockey. While the team's recent ability to come back late breeds hope, the pattern of falling behind early and counting on a good 3rd period to be enough is a tough recipe to cook up regularly.
2) A 2nd burst of offense. Skinner/EStaal/Ruutu have been lights out scoring-wise for a couple weeks now. Skinner has 8 goals in his past 8 game and EStaal and Ruutu have chipped in too. The key to more sustained offense versus flashes of greatness will be the Canes ability to muster sustained pressure that gets handed off from line to line versus the more "mini bursts of scoring packed in a single good shift" that has been more the norm of late. With Semin back in the lineup but not necessarily needed on the top line right now and the 4th line of Bowman/Malhotra/Dvorak likely to play together again, the Canes have the personnel available at forward to push 4 lines deep. The key to playing more offense and being less hemmed in the defensive zone is stringing together a consistent push across multiple lines, getting the puck deep, playing in the offensive zone and taking shooting opportunities.
3) More cohesion moving the puck. The Vancouver loss and the Calgary OTL looked very similar to me in terms of inability to generate offense because of 2 things that are sort of related. First, in both games the opponent was pretty successful hemming the Canes in their own end for extended periods. When the Canes finally got the puck on their stick, there were no legs left and it was more time for a dump and a line change than a chance to try to score. Second and partly because of the volume of time in their own end, the Canes puck movement featured a whole bunch of 1-2 forwards gliding in without numbers and taking whatever low percentage shot they could get without any traffic in front of the net before also heading off on a line change usually with the other team starting with puck possession again for the next shift.
I think the key to decreasing the sluggish look of the offense and transition is getting puck possession earlier in shifts either via face-off or winning more battles and then moving the puck as a 5-man unit not a 1-2 man unit as the other players are headed off for a change.
It starts with puck possession. It continues with being faster and crisper moving the puck up the ice. It hopefully ends with being able to play offense with more than 2 players which creates more options and frees up players to (hopefully) get back to creating traffic in front of the net. Canes fans like to grumble about lack of willingness to go to the front of the net, but a big part of it is that the Canes are playing too many full shifts on defense which means that when they transition to offense any players not part of the initial rush are headed to the bench for a line change. There is no one left to go to the front on a 2-on-2 or 2-on-3 rush.
Because of the combination of the good start to the current 7-game swing, the struggles since then and the long layoff on the way, I think this game is much more important than your run of the mill game to close out a road trip. A win makes for 2 consecutive weeks on the upswing of the rollercoaster even if this week is more middle than truly up. A loss makes for another round of alternating up and down on a weekly basis.
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