Who are the Carolina Hurricanes, really? As NHL season begins, it depends who you ask

If you listen to the hockey cognoscenti, the sometimes legitimate and sometimes self-ordained experts, the Carolina Hurricanes are taking a step back this season. The New Jersey Devils are the flavor of the month for October and the New York Rangers are preferred to the Hurricanes, in that world at least.

Over in the analytics world, nothing has changed, even if a chunk of the Hurricanes’ roster has turned over. The Hurricanes may not be the math-on-paper Stanley Cup favorite they were a year ago, but they’re still picked to win the Metropolitan Division by the number-crunchers, collectively speaking.

In hockey, just as in baseball, those viewpoints don’t always align when it comes to players and strategies, but they’re usually not this far off when it comes to preseason predictions. Typically, the conventional wisdom reflects the underlying numbers. Nobody’s quibbling over, say, the Edmonton Oilers.

It’s the collision of two inevitabilities, neither of which has anything to do with how good the Hurricanes can or will be this season. Losing popular, long-serving players like Brett Pesce, Brady Skjei and Teuvo Teravainen — not to mention the summary departure of that guy who was here for a month or two, Jake whatshisname — makes the Hurricanes easy to doubt.

As does the elevation of Eric Tulsky to general manager, in a sport where the old school is still suspicious of all the data and whatnot. He’s going to have to prove himself to his peers and armchair peers, and he knew he had a busy summer in front of him.

He was always going to be a test case in the hockey world, fairly or not, and the fact that many of his replacements for the dearly departed were highly regarded in the analytics community explains why the objective perspective of the Hurricanes hasn’t changed that much, even if the subjective perspective has.

Three of the Hurricanes’ six incoming free agents were among the 15 identified by Evolving Hockey — a site that crafts stunningly accurate salary predictions — as the best value signings going into the summer: William Carrier, Shayne Gostisbehere and Sean Walker. (The Other Sebastian Aho was also on the list, a tragically missed marketing opportunity.)

Everyone in hockey is working off their own bespoke analytic systems, but there’s some general consensus, so if that’s what you’re looking at, you’re probably going to continue to regard the Hurricanes highly. But other than Carrier, none of the arrivals had the same cachet in the game as Pesce and Skjei in particular, both of whom cashed in big on the open market. So if you’re only going on reputation, you might rationally downgrade the Hurricanes.

It all makes sense if you look at it both ways.

This is all freighted with uncertainty anyway. If players like Andrei Svechnikov, Martin Necas and Jesperi Kotkaniemi can make leaps forward — and they’re all capable — and the Hurricanes’ fortunes could actually improve. And that assumes Frederik Andersen stays healthy and Pyotr Kochetkov continues to grow in an expanded role, but that’s true of almost every team in the league. There are only a few goaltenders you can truly depend on. Everyone else is hoping for the best.

The obvious reality is, it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks. Barring a wave of injuries or other misfortune, the Hurricanes are still clearly a playoff team, whether they win the division or not. What’s changed is the range of possible outcomes, for better or worse. That’s different for a team that, for the past few years, knew pretty much who it was before training camp even started. No one expected Jackson Blake to be here, either (or Jesper Fast to be missing).

If no one’s quite sure what the Hurricanes will be, maybe they’re not either yet. Starting Friday night, everyone will find out. Including them.

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