Amid another offseason of change, Carolina Hurricanes’ continuity still stands out

Rod Brind’Amour had to pause for a moment to count up the new faces his head. It doesn’t seem, in this season of continuity and expectations, that all that much has changed for the Carolina Hurricanes, even with the turnover on the roster.

“I think we’ve got, what, seven new guys? Out of 20, that’s a lot,” the Hurricanes coach said Thursday. “I think we had eight last year. Same kind of thing. It’s just the nature of the game, how it goes. But it’s the pieces that we do always seem to keep, that’s our core group, and we love them, obviously.”

There’s always a sense of newness and novelty on the first day of training camp, inexorable and unavoidable. But despite all the new faces it’s more muted this year than it ever has been. The core group remains intact, the goalies are back, the staff remained intact, the captains are intact and the mission hasn’t changed.

Once again, the Hurricanes begin a season that will be judged by only one metric. The days when getting better was enough are long gone. There are truly no points for second place.

For at least one of the newcomers, that’s a familiar feeling. Brent Burns was the biggest acquisition of the offseason, as critical an addition as any made by any NHL team, and he knows it well from his days with the San Jose Sharks when that franchise was perpetually on the cusp.

He’s here, at 37, to try again, to be the missing piece that gets the Hurricanes over the top to win another Stanley Cup, 17 years after the first, which even in September is the only item on the agenda.

“I’m sure it’s very similar to when we were making our runs in San Jose,” Burns said. “You’re close. You feel really good with your group. You feel really good about what you’re doing. But there’s a little more, whatever that is.”

There are other new faces, of course, elsewhere on the defense and Paul Stastny in the Nino Niederreiter slot on the first day of practice and Ondrej Kase, finally Hurricanes. Max Pacioretty was present in spirit if not on the ice as he rehabs his torn Achilles.

Burns is the big one, though, the kind of elite player who can have an immediate impact, a physical specimen gliding through the skating portion of Thursday’s practice more easily than players half his age.

“He’s the perfect fit,” Brind’Amour said. “I hate that we had to wait until he’s been in the league 20 years to get him, but better late than never.”

So many of the other faces remain all too familiar: Sebastian Aho to Jordan Staal’s left in the dressing room, Teuvo Teravainen and Jesperi Kotaniemi, Jaccob Slavin and Brett Pesce and Brady Sjkei, Frederik Andersen and Aanti Rantaa, Andrei Svechnikov and Martin Necas a year older and presumably closer to reaching their potential. Even some of the new faces are old ones, Calvin de Haan and Derek Stepan having returned on tryout deals, Ryan Dzingel on an AHL deal.

“Why mess with a good thing? I think we have a good thing going,” Hurricanes captain Staal said. “There’s always room for improvement and that’s what we did over the summer.”

That group has had the same mandate for three years, and for the first time will look back at the way the previous season ended with some disdain. What happened against the New York Rangers — and even to a certain extent, the narrow first-round escape against the Boston Bruins — should not and will not be far from mind.

The new players arrive without that motivation, but it’s impossible to escape it, because it will hang over this season. Despite their regular-season success, they did not meet their own standards when it mattered. But it all starts over now, a chance to begin again, new faces and old.

“You just want to be in that conversation,” Brind’Amour said. “Listen, you can have the best team in the league every year, it just gives you a chance. And we want to have a chance. I think it’s pretty safe to say with this group we have now that we have a chance. And that’s a far cry from those stretches where it was more of a hope. Now it’s not.”

So much may be different, but nothing has changed. There’s only one way the season that began Thursday can end well. That all remains the same.

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