The Carolina Hurricanes are making these last two weeks of the season still entertaining to watch with riding a three game winning streak, they’re still mathematically not eliminated from the playoffs. Rookie Warren Foegele, from the same hometown as Jeff Skinner, made his NHL debut and had a great game scoring a goal on his first shot and adding an assist on fellow former Checker, Valentine Zykov’s goal later in the game.
Jeff Skinner scored the first goal and the last goal in a wild game against the Arizona Coyotes that saw one of the flukiest goals ever in the NHL. The Canes were without three key players – Noah Hanifin with a concussion, Brett Pesce and Victor Rask both with season ending shoulder injuries. The Coyotes started the season off on a 0-12 winless streak but have turned things around with one of the best records in the past eight weeks. They’re nowhere near making the playoffs but considering the young talent they have, they’ll be a strong team in a couple of years.
Scott Darling may be big enough to play football but when you lose a hockey game giving up touchdowns and extra points, something is wrong.
Stick a fork in the Canes season and forget the math, their season is done and for the most part. The effort on the ice and, on the bench, was pitiful. Any team that is able to hold Connor McDavid to just one second assist and scores three goals has to think they’d be the team coming out on top so despite the fine effort by Jaccob Slavin, Brett Pesce and Jordan Staal containing McDavid, the Canes managed to have another horrible game.
It was a battle of two teams going through identical records over the past 10 games, 3-6-1, and both headed in the same direction: south in the standings. Only question was which team would dig a little deeper, try a little harder and give their fans a little more hope of making a wild card spot for the playoffs.
After a miserable effort against the weakest team in the NHL for 2018 the night before, losing to the NY Rangers 6-3 in NY, the Canes had a 3-1 lead going into the third period against a very strong, rental-filled Boston Bruins team, increasing the lead to 4-1 within the first minute of the period, collapsing like house of cards, yielding five goals to virtually end their season.
The Carolina Hurricanes had mixed results this weekend, with a strong win over the New Jersey Devils on Friday and a narrow loss to the Winnipeg Jets on Sunday.
When Bill Peters came to Raleigh to interview for the head coaching job, he had a notebook in tow with analytics about every category regarding the Canes and where the team was good and where the longer list was of where the team needed improvement. It didn’t take any special analytics for evaluating or summarizing the game against the Penguins after a full four day break.
The Carolina Hurricanes had a bad weekend at home. If it wasn’t hard enough losing to the New Jersey Devils, the Canes lost their playoff spot in a non-scoring game against the New York Islanders.
Some nights everything seems to go right and some nights everything seems to go wrong. On the eve of Valentine’s Day, everything went right for the Carolina Hurricanes as they pummeled the L.A. Kings 7-3 behind Justin’s Faulk’s first career hat trick along with Jeff Skinner popping in two pretty goals.
It took just 14 seconds for the Carolina Hurricanes to score a five-on-five goal in what seemed like forever when Brett Pesce put in his second of the season establishing a new record for the fastest goal in the franchise by a defenseman. With back to back games this weekend, coach Bill Peters selected Scott Darling to be in the net with the Canucks at this point of the season, are the weaker of the two teams plus the Canucks best player got hurt the night before in Tampa Bay.