So it turns out locking the team in a hotel for 36 hours and then turning them lose seems to bring out the best in the Canes. After being marooned in Buffalo a couple weeks back, the Canes next game was the 6-1 home win against Toronto that was 1 of the best of the season. After being stuck in a hotel in Philadelphia yesterday, the results were a win again. 1 more round of this and the team might find itself holed up in a Raleigh hotel on off days before home games.
I think the biggest underlying story in the win was that the Canes oscillated back to being sound defensively. The occasional game with too many breakdowns has been a storyline of late with a rough night by Sekera/Faulk and not enough help from Justin Peters in net being enough to lose a game in a single period on Sunday night. The other big story and continuing theme is that the top line of Tlusty/EStaal/Semin continues to heat up to the tune of 2 goals in Wednesday’s win.
A few quick notes:
--Harrison/Komisarek. The pairing has been the good version of quiet of late. Surely someone is doing some kind of shot tally when they are on the ice to say whether they are playing well or not. But it is much simpler and easy enough to figure out visually. They have been sound in their own end, avoided the bad kind of turnovers and just generally not made mistakes. That is what you want from your 3rd pairing, not some count of shots.
--Alexander Semin. The newly named Olympian now has 4 goals in 3 games since Jim Rutherford took a stake and stuck it ………… in the sand. His goal was a goal scorer’s goal where he just flat beat the goalie into a tiny corner of the net that is hard to defend. For me, the most striking difference in Semin’s game recently is Semin going Ovechkin in terms of propensity to shoot the puck and look to score goals. For a player of Semin’s skill level, this is a good thing.
--Tuomo Ruutu. He did not get on the score sheet, but he had his best game in some time. Most significantly, he was just was more noticeable which is the most important thing for him anyway. Even when he was playing better, his role was never that of an offensive juggernaut, it was that of a cruise missile flying the length of the rink and hitting whatever was in his way. In his 1st shift he picked up 2 shots and 4 hits. He had another great shift and a good scoring chance in close on a partial line change with Skinner/JStaal in the 3rd period. He also finished with 7 hits.
Ideal for Ruutu is to find a way to consistently bring the level of bang he brought Wednesday. If he does that, his scoring contribution will increase but even if it did not, he would be back to doing what he does that makes the team better. Thursday will be a test to note trying to muster a repeat performance in the 2nd half of a back-to-back.
--Nathan Gerbe. By the time I post this late game recap, I would guess that every sports site and Twitter will have exploded with video of the Nathan Gerbe goal, but if you were under a rock hockey-wise Wednesday night and have not heard, you need to go hunt down video of the Hertl repeat except in a game and at a time where the game was still to be decided.
--Sekera/Faulk. It was great to see them rebound after a rare bad outing on Sunday.
--Gerbe/Malhotra/Dwyer. This line illustrates the issue with the lack of forward depth that the Canes have right now. The line scored on Wednesday, but it is probably not realistic to expect regular offense from this line. So in terms of slotting things, the same set of 3 is probably significantly light offensively as a 3rd line, but if they were slotted as a 4th line, they would be perfect being sound defensively and a couple penalty killers to keep the scorers off the ice for the hard minutes and any offense would be a bonus.
--Skinner/JStaal/Lindholm. Unless there was a brief stint earlier in the season that I forgot, Wednesday was a 1st for this combination. They were the quietest of the bunch, but not in a horrible way. And Skinner did pick up a couple decent scoring chances along the way. I was on record since the beginning of last season as wanting to separate Skinner and JStaal into different types of lines, but that might have to wait until Rutherford can add a C3 with enough offensive ability to make sure Skinner’s phenomenal 2013-14 finishing ability is not completely underutilized.
--John-Michael Liles. After watching him for 9 games is his uncanny ability to use some combination of reading plays and above average speed to get to loose pucks either 1st or as a fast 2nd to either win the puck or at least slow down its progress. He has been especially good in the offensive zone keeping pucks with very few mistakes being too aggressive, but he has also used the same ability in the defensive zone.
As good as the win against the Flyers was, the situation basically sets up the same as the Florida/Tampa pair from this weekend. Without a follow up win against Buffalo on Thursday, the result is just more treading water/1 step forward then 1 step back which is not good enough with teams like Columbus starting to try to swim away.
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