This is part 1 of a sort of Jekyl and Hyde dual blog posting. This blog, “My 5 darkest Canes fears… is the companion blog for the much more optimistic “5 reasons for hope… that you can find HERE.
Let me first say that these are not so much assertions or predictions but rather things where there is enough evidence, possibility or at least things to monitor to consider it possible and to keep an eye on as things develop.
My 5 darkest fears are that:
1) The lack of scoring is not so much a function of individual player slumps but rather the result of a system incapable of generating enough offense. I touched on this in a past blog writing after the Rangers game. I finished by asked a couple questions:
“When was the last time the Canes got an easy goal? How many do you figure the team has total this entire season? And relative to how many odd man rushes our opponents have had, how many do you figure the Canes have had?…
In improving the defense (which was definitely needed to be more competitive) the Canes made a couple significant changes:
--Personnel: The Canes jettisoned a bunch of offense-oriented, puck-moving defensemen in Corvo, McBain and Sanguinetti and then lost Pitkanen to injury. Ryan Murphy re-adds a similar skill set and Andrej Sekera and Ron Hainsey are decent all-around defensemen, but I think it is fair to say that the defense stepped a notch down offensively.
--The system: 1 of the most notable changes that has helped defensively is what I term “whenever danger come back to the house… in which the Canes quite regularly play with all 5 players within a stride and a half of the paint to defend the front of the net. All teams do this situationally, but with the regularity that the Canes have all 5 players deep and bunched up, I worry that the team has virtually no ability to move the puck up the ice at much better than 2v3 which makes it real hard to generate any easy offense in the NHL.
I am not suggesting that the team should abandon defense to try to generate offense, but there is a delicate balance to be reached between playing defense first but also having the ability to transition quickly to the offensive rush.
I continue to hold out hope that it is just a matter of getting Skinner back in the lineup to drive the 3rd line and getting a couple other players going, but I am less and less certain of that.
2) The team just does not have enough talent to compete for a playoff spot. When you go through the Canes forwards and try to slot them, I think the pessimistic but defendable version could go like this: --EStaal, Semin, Tlusty, Skinner, JStaal are all top 6 (or top 9 if you want to spread the offense across 3 lines as I have advocated). That is 5 players to fill 9 spots. --Ruutu should be top 9 but coming off a couple hip surgeries and a supposedly different lower body injury, he has not been top 9 quality yet. Elias Lindholm has shown signs of being a good player, and it could be soon, but thus far he has been more future than today. Patrick Dwyer is a great defensive player, but with a scoring ceiling of 25-30 points he looks more like a great 4th-line role player than a 15 minute/game top 9 forward. I would say the same of Riley Nash. As much as I like his game so far this season, I continue to look for evidence that he can score 35-40 points to be a good 3rd line center; otherwise, he too looks like a great 4th-liner. To date, Nathan Gerbe has been top 9 capable with his scoring burst, but I fear that even he might really be a 4th-liner on a hot streak at least on a good team. He reminds me a bit of Michael Frolik on the Blackhawks last year where you had a guy with high energy and some scoring ability but not enough consistency to play in the top 6 on a real good team. Radek Dvorak is another player who has played very well, but he has had only 2 seasons where he scored at a good 3rd-line pace. It is asking a bunch for him to suddenly find another at age 36. Similarly I think Bowman and Malhotra are both slotted about right as 4th-liners.
When you net it out, I think you have 5 pure top 9 players plus a couple more than could be (Ruutu if he gets going and Lindholm if he develops rapidly). I think you can overslot 1 or 2 players in the top 9 especially if they have chemistry/specific roles. But when injuries hit like right now and you are filling more than half of the top 9 with players who might be a bit of a stretch it shows.
If Skinner can return and drive 3rd line production (exactly like he was before injury) in a way where he gets his points but equally importantly generates offense for his line mates, the team suddenly looks deeper offensively. If you then couple that with any kind of offensive pulse from the Staals and if Semin can continue his rising, then just maybe there is enough offense there despite maybe being 1 or 2 players short in terms of pure top 9 players.
3) The next 5 games could make the deficit too big to overcome even if the team rebounds. The Canes play their next 5 games at home. If the Canes continue to sink and go say 1-4 to run the season record to 5-11-3, might the hole be too big already at 6 games under .500? In addition, the next 4 games feature 4 good teams with 3 on the road (@Bos, Bos, @Det, @StL). Even if the team plays well in those games, it is a real tough stretch to make up ground. So coming out of the 5 at home and then 4 following that, the team would suddenly be 23 games into the season, with a ton of emotional taxes paid and a big deficit in the standings to make up.
4) Jordan Staal is not who we hoped he was. In Pittsburgh, Jordan Staal was the best 3rd line center in the NHL. Best sounds great, but the key caveat is “3rd line.… He had significant benefits in that role. First, no one gave any thought whatsoever to matching up against his line in terms of defensive priority. It is not that he did not play against good players. He played quite a bit against other teams’ top offensive players. But no one targeted him in any way defensively. Second and maybe more important, he had exactly zero pressure in terms of scoring. That was Malkin and Crosby’s job. In Pittsburgh, he could have a slow week or 10 days and as long as he was playing well defensively and Crosby and Malkin were scoring, which they almost always are, it was no big deal. Fast forward to the current Canes situation. Per the blog I wrote last week. I actually think his play overall has been good enough at even strength. The scoring is light, but his line is giving up very little, so it still works out to break even which for me is good enough as long as he is taking a bunch of the hard matchups/minutes. But in a 2nd line center role on a team struggling to score that is not at all the vibe around his scoring total, and you can see it is affecting him. In the span of 2-3 games last week he twice whiffed completely on passes to him in front of the net and failed to get off any kind of shot on a breakaway when the puck was actually behind his stick not on it.
After a rough 2012-13 season where he failed to find much chemistry with anyone on his 2nd line and along with line mate Jeff Skinner were at the bottom of the league in plus/minus and a slow offensive start this year, we are now nearing 70 games into his transition from 3rd line to 2nd line center without any concrete evidence that this transition will be successful. The franchise locked into 9 ¾ more years at $6M betting this works. If I had to bet, I would say that it will once he fights through the growing pains and gets there. But if I were an NHL GM, I would not have bet a full 10 years at full price before seeing a bit more evidence that my bet was right.
5) Sort of along the same lines, if parts of the top of the current roster are not right, there is no way to fix it. The Canes have huge amounts of money tied up in players that are offering more questions than answers lately. Less than 15 games into this season, Cam Ward has already incurred what seems to be an annual injury. He has 2 more years on his contract at $6.3M/year. Tuomo Ruutu is coming off 2 hip surgeries and then another lower body injury from preseason. He has yet to look like his old self now 8 games into the season and has 2 more years at $5M/year. Tim Gleason struggled last season and is still trying to take hold of a top 4 D spot this season. With Harrison/Murphy playing well together in the 3rd pair, the next step down is depth defenseman, and he is signed for 2 more years at $4M/year. Neither Eric Staal or Alexander Semin are playing for any kind of discount to “must be sure fire 1st line NHL star… at $8.25M (cap hit) and $7M/year respectively.
Without going into too many negative details, you get 2 things:
--The volume of salary $ committed to the top of the roster does not leave much to fill out the bottom half of the roster with anything other than inexpensive system youth.
--A couple of these players could become untradeable in this salary cap world where value is a function of not just how good a player is but how good he is relative to his cap hit. This could leave the Canes stuck with the current core for better or for worse.
My biggest fear short-term is #1. If this proves to be true, the likely result is that the team gets healthy, hope resumes, results do not follow and ultimately Muller gets canned and another season minus playoff hockey becomes evident by early in 2014. Longer term I worry about #4 combined with #5. Canes GM Jim Rutherford has made significant bets in terms of $ and term on the core of this team. If that is wrong by too much, I think it could become nearly impossible to unravel it, start from a new younger core (see the other part of this blog) and build around it. If a few big contracts become immovable, I think the team is looking at 2016-17 (so 2 more years of status quo) before enough of the big contracts come off the books to free money to try a different way.
Here is hoping the Canes can find some way to scratch out a couple wins soon and then get healthy and do even better so that Canes fans can focus on trying to make the 2014 playoffs instead of trying to figure out the brain teaser for how to fix the current core and improve.
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