Hurricanes return home with questions instead of wins after letting Rangers off the hook

Instead of a road win, or a power-play goal, or much of anything to show for their commendable effort in the first two games of this series, the Carolina Hurricanes now have questions. Lots of questions. They’ll bring a planeload of them home with them, and very few answers.

That is the way of the postseason, sometimes, as the twists and turns of a series loop back on each other and the pitter-patter of little issues becomes a drumbeat of failure. This is where the Hurricanes find themselves after Tuesday’s 4-3 double-overtime loss to the New York Rangers, and even with the additional period and a half, the verses were different from Game 1 but the chorus was the same.

The goaltending wasn’t good enough to win it. Their five-on-five dominance hasn’t been rewarded. And their special teams have been an unmitigated catastrophe.

The Hurricanes had a one-goal lead in the third period Tuesday before the Rangers tied it with a power-play goal and won it with a power-play goal. Between those two back-breaking goals, the Hurricanes had two power plays of their own, either of which would have won the game and brought home-ice advantage back to Raleigh instead of just simmering frustration.

“We’re right there,” said Jake Guentzel, who scored twice in his best game of the playoffs so far. “It’s a small margin for error in the playoffs. We’ve got to buckle down on the power play and find a way to get one there.”

Two one-goal losses. Minus-4 on special teams. A recipe for disaster. Seven of the Hurricanes’ last 11 playoff games have been one-goal losses. If the playoffs are a contest of fine margins, the Hurricanes are ending up on the wrong side too often.

So now, questions.

Lots of questions.

Is it time to give Pyotr Kochetkov a look in goal? Frederik Andersen gave up a ton of rebounds and the game-tying and game-winning goals both came after shots he initially saved. Andersen hasn’t been terrible, but he hasn’t outplayed Igor Shesterkin, either.

What about the penalty-kill, which has allowed four power-play goals in two games? The Rangers were 2-for-7 on the power play Tuesday, which suggests that it may be a problem of volume as much as execution.

The Hurricanes are too often playing into the Rangers’ hands that way. It contributed to Evgeny Kuznetsov’s benching for Game 2, after Adam Fox goaded him into a retaliatory cross-check, and Fox did it again Tuesday. Fox snuck in a punch to Guentzel’s face in a scrum, then buckled like his lights went out when Guentzel returned fire, drawing a penalty. (To that point, it was Guentzel’s best shot of the playoffs, a distinction it did not hold for long.)

At a certain point, that’s not on the Rangers. Leopard, spots, etc. It’s on the Hurricanes for giving them the opportunities. Which they did over and over again. (Andrei Svechnikov, master of the offensive-zone penalty, took two of them.)

And then there’s the power play, officially 0-for-10 in the series but really 0-for-8, given that two opportunities were cut short immediately by Hurricanes penalties. The Hurricanes have retreated to their worst instincts, passing the puck passively around the perimeter, waiting for perfection instead of putting the puck on net.

Can the power play even be fixed at this point, before it’s too late? Has it become too predicable, an open book to playoff opponents who have figured out how to stop it? Given how close the Hurricanes came to winning one or both of these games, is it too late already?

“We have to be sharper,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “We have to get inside. We’re on the outside and it’s just not how we do it, anyway. We’ve got to get back to doing it how we know how.”

The series isn’t over yet. Far from it. The Hurricanes are headed home with a chance to come back here next week on even terms, asking all the questions for a change. It’s what the Rangers did to them after falling behind 2-0 on the road in 2022.

But unlike their power play through two games, the Hurricanes will actually have to take advantage.

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