Night of season-firsts for Hurricanes yields one they’d rather have waited on: A first loss

There’s nothing quite like Opening Night in hockey.

The Stanley Cup playoffs are fun, intense, important. So much is at stake as a season ends.

But Opening Night is when it all begins and so much seems possible. Most teams are healthy, the players are edgy and eager to drop the puck, go at it and start a new season.

So it was Friday for the Carolina Hurricanes and the Tampa Bay Lightning at the Lenovo Center, the Lightning’s Nikita Kucherov scoring a hat trick in the third period for a 4-1 victory to spoil the night for the home fans.

Kucherov’s power-play score with 8 minutes, 54 seconds left in regulation pushed Tampa Bay ahead 2-1, six seconds after Nicholas Paul won the draw. The Canes’ Dmitry Orlov was called for hooking Anthony Cirelli with nine minutes left on a Cirelli breakaway.

Kucherov’s had two empty-net goals to finish it off for the Lightning and give him a four-point night.

Opening night is full of firsts — power plays, penalties, cheers, boos, bruises, bruised feelings.

It was Frederik Andersen starting for Carolina and Andrei Vasilevskiy for the Lightning, and both veteran goalies were tested often enough.

The Canes got their first goal of the season from their captain, Jordan Staal, as Carolina’s heaviest line threw its weight around in the first period.

Jordan Martinook, hard on the forecheck, first forced a turnover. William Carrier grabbed the puck and carried it behind the net, then centered to Staal on the far side for a tap-in. After a somnambulant start to the game, the Canes led 1-0 with 5:28 left in the first.

The Lightning tied it early in the second on Brayden Point’s power-play goal, and it was a 1-1 game going into the third.

This was a season-opening game unlike others for the Lightning. The team traveled to the Triangle on Monday with Hurricane Milton growing in strength and aimed at Florida’s Gulf Coast.

The Tampa area was spared a direct hit from Milton on Wednesday, although the storm’s impact did result in Saturday’s Lightning-Hurricanes game at Amalie Arena being postponed to a date yet to be determined.

Many of the Lightning players and coaches had their families accompany them to North Carolina — “A saving grace,” Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper said Friday. They later learned that their homes in the Tampa area, in most cases, received minimal damage, an obvious relief.

There was a smattering of boos Friday night when Tampa Bay’s Jake Guentzel touched the puck. That was expected after Guentzel, dealt to Carolina by Pittsburgh before the trade deadline last season, did not re-sign with the Canes after the playoffs despite a long-term contract offer.

But the sellout crowd was mostly loud and lively on the first night of the season.

“You’re always excited to get a new opportunity, which every year is,” Canes coach Rod Brind’Amour said on Friday morning. “Everybody starts the same, everybody has the same goals. You get to lay it out there, finally, and for real. There’s a lot of apprehension, because you just want to get it going, but a lot of excitement, too.”

Brind’Amour said as a coach he’s probably a little more nervous than when he played, saying, “As a coach, you worry about 20 guys’ games. But by this point you’ve done a million practice and video sessions, and it’s time for them to show their stuff.”

Playing hockey on Friday was good for both teams — the Canes tired of the constant practice in preseason camp and the Lightning as another way for its players to restore normalcy in their lives after the fears about the hurricane.

“There’s no doubt it has been a distraction, but I will say I think the guys are looking forward to the game because it’s been a little bit of ‘Groundhog Day’ for a while in that we’ve been on the road for a while just to play one game,” Cooper said after his team’s morning skate Friday.

The extended stay in the Triangle allowed him to meet former Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski — Cooper played lacrosse for Duke lacrosse coach John Danoswki at Hofstra in the late 1980s. Cooper later took an informal tour of UNC — the team was staying in Chapel Hill — where he said he saw “many hundreds of pictures of Michael Jordan everywhere.”

Guentzel’s trade to Carolina was the most talked-about transaction in the league at the deadline last season and gave the Canes a proven, needed extra scorer for the playoffs.

Guentzel had 25 points in 17 regular-season games and then nine in 11 in the playoffs before the Canes were eliminated in the second round by the New York Rangers.

“He’s a very, very good player,” Brind’Amour said on Friday morning. “When you coach against him, you kinda know. When you get somebody with you for a while and you get to see every shift, every second of how they do things, you have a different appreciation.

“He’s a top-end player for sure and thinks the game very well. That’s why he was sought after.”