Hurricanes’ path back starts with a single goal — exactly what’s been hardest to find

One goal.

One single goal.

One (expletive) goal in the words of Peter Laviolette in 2010, the third coach to mastermind a comeback from a 3-0 deficit. Some guy named Justin Williams, another familiar name in these parts, played for the team that pulled off a fourth, in 2014.

The all-but-impossible quest to dig out of that 3-0 hole doesn’t start with winning a game, or even a period. It starts with a single goal, as Laviolette told his Philadelphia Flyers against the Boston Bruins in 2010, stalking the bench, growling “one (expletive) goal.”

They got a goal. They won a game. They won another. They won two more. They defied the odds.

The Carolina Hurricanes have to channel their former coach, but their task may be even tougher than that of the 204 teams that preceded them in this predicament, because the inability to score a single goal is exactly why they will now face elimination Wednesday. They threw everything they had at Sergei Bobrovsky, beyond even the first two games, and still to no avail in a 1-0 Game 3 loss Monday.

“At this point you’ve just got to get one by him,” Hurricanes forward Jordan Martinook said. “Then you hopefully can get some momentum off that. I thought tonight was probably our best game of the series. We controlled it for a lot of the game. It’s right there. I don’t know. It’s close.”

Every game in this series has been decided by a single goal. Every second of this series, all 15,698 of them, the teams have been tied or separated by a single goal. And yet they’re now divided by three games, the biggest gap of all, the Hurricanes having lost an improbable 11 straight in the conference finals.

These three are the most difficult of those to fathom. The Hurricanes haven’t lost a bunch of 5-2 games. They haven’t been let down by bad goaltending. They’ve just been unable to beat Bobrovsky, who looked like a washed-up 34-year-old during the regular season but has turned the clock back a decade in the postseason. They had a 25-7 advantage in scoring chances over the final two periods, and were still outscored 1-0.

Bobrovsky’s impenetrability is now officially historic, the most saves in the first three games of a conference-finals series in NHL history, having stopped 67 straight shots since Jalen Chatfield’s opening goal in Game 2, never mind his 63 saves in Game 1. In terms of goals saved above average, Bobrovsky has been twice as good as the next-best goalie in the postseason ... who happens to be Frederik Andersen.

“We can’t do much more,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “We like how we’re playing, clearly. We’ve got to find a way to get one in. Defensively, we’ve given up nothing, really. Three games. If you said to me, we’ve got one of the potent offenses you’re playing, you’re giving them 20 shots a night, you’d be pretty happy. And we’re creating offense. Felt like we hit a couple posts tonight, two, three. It’s there for us. We’ve got to find a way to put it in.”

It was impossible to fault the Hurricanes’ approach in this one. They did everything they did in the first two games and added everything they didn’t do. More traffic. More elevated shots. Fewer unobstructed shots. Better passing around the net. Allowing the Panthers only nine shots over the final 40 minutes. And still had nothing to show for it after hitting the post twice and failing to beat Bobrovsky otherwise.

They even knocked the series’ other dominant player, Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov, out of the game but couldn’t press that advantage. Jack Drury rubbed Barkov out with an innocuous hit along the sideboards midway through the first period, but their legs tangled awkwardly and Barkov did not return.

It didn’t help that the Hurricanes absolutely dominated play yet came away with a 4-1 power-play disadvantage — the Panthers’ lone goal came on a power play, off Jaccob Slavin’s stick — or they were deprived a six-on-four advantage in the final two minutes when Sam Reinhart high-sticked Shayne Gostisbehere with the Carolina net empty.

The officials stopped play but decided it wasn’t a penalty, the last of several curious decisions by an officiating crew that seemed overwhelmed from the opening minute. But as Brind’Amour also pointed out, the Hurricanes didn’t do much with the one power play they had anyway.

It might even have been their worst of the postseason, although that’s probably the least of their frustrations at this point. Jesperi Kotkaniemi destroyed his stick in the tunnel leading off the ice afterward with a series of blows so savage that Drury, walking behind him, had to cover his face to protect himself.

“How are you not frustrated?” Brind’Amour said. “There are times when you lose and you’re frustrated because you got beat, but it feels like we’re losing but we’re not really getting beat. That’s where it gets frustrating.”

Anger. Frustration. Desperation. That’s what the Hurricanes have instead of goals or wins. They’ve been backed into a corner, and the path out starts with a single goal, which is exactly what they’ve found the hardest this series.

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