This Islanders series figures to be more entertaining
The Carolina Hurricanes posted a short Stanley Cup playoff promo on social media Wednesday with the tag line: “Time to turn the temperature up.”
The first player shown was Andrei Svechnikov, his helmet off and game face on, almost defiantly flexing his stick on his shoulders like a player ready to get on the ice and get it on.
The Canes couldn’t have done that a year ago. When the 2023 playoffs began, the power forward had been out for a month and undergone knee surgery. Svechnikov’s season was over.
Svechnikov, in a white shirt and tie, did sound the warning siren at PNC Arena before the first playoff game, against the New York Islanders. He gave it a hard crank, even though teammate Seth Jarvis later joked it would have been better had Svechnikov then taken off the shirt and swirled it around his head.
“He was a little more professional than I would have been,” Jarvis quipped.
Svechnikov will be a lot more involved this year as the playoffs begin for the Canes — again against the Islanders, again at PNC Arena, with Game 1 set Saturday. He hopes to be forceful, impactful, a difference-maker.
“It was so tough last year being out of the playoffs,” Svechnikov said Thursday after a team practice. “It’s been a while and I’m excited and I have goosebumps thinking about it.
“It’s been a long season and we’ve been waiting for this. We’ve got all the skill, all the talent, on this team. We know we can do this.”
The playoffs have produced a mixture of hard-hitting play, deep emotions and disappointing injuries for Svechnikov since Carolina made the Russian winger the No. 2 overall pick of the 2018 NHL draft.
The physicality of the playoffs?
“I love it,” Svechnikov said, smiling. “It’s kind of my game.”
Boston Bruins defenseman Hampus Lindholm can attest to that, taking a howitzer of a shoulder-to-chest hit from Svechnikov in the 2022 playoffs that shattered Lindholm’s stick and sent him crashing to the ice.
“Maybe my hardest hit ever,” Svechnikov said Thursday,
It feels like an inviolable rule of the postseason that the Carolina Hurricanes so rarely get to explore new territory, and so often keep running into the same people in the same places.
The New York Islanders, again. Has the same ring to it as the New Jersey Devils, again. Or the Boston Bruins, again. Or any one of the playoff opponents that seem to keep turning up over and over, year after year. Time, in the Hurricanes’ playoff universe, truly is a flat circle.
And in the case of the Islanders,
any and all would be forgiven for dreading another Festival of Icings against Lou Lamoriello’s tribute act to his Dead Puck Era champion Devils.
So the good news-bad news is that while this is still a Lamoriello-built team, and you know what you’re going to get from that, which means above all it will not be easy or fun to play against, it’s also now a Patrick Roy-coached team, and no one has any idea what Roy is going to do or say at any given time.
This much is certain: This series may end up being many things, but it won’t be dull. Again.
That first-round series last year wasn’t a lot of fun for anyone, especially Teuvo Teravainen, and to their credit the Islanders were able to slog it out to a sixth game up there,
extra travel and mileage that couldn’t have helped the Hurricanes by the time they were trying to scrape out a goal — one goal, any goal at all — against the Florida Panthers in the conference finals. (A new playoff opponent, for once, but with too familiar a face behind the bench.)
After that six-game series and the Hurricanes’ four-game sweep in 2019, the latter in Brooklyn instead of the new barn at Belmont, nobody around here was clamoring for more of the Islanders. At a certain point, you start pressing your luck.
Roy breathed life into the Islanders when he replaced Lane Lambert in January the same way he breathed fire into every dressing room ever inhabited — or wanted to leave. As a player, as a first-time NHL coach, as a chastened junior coach, and as a second-chance NHL coach, Roy has never once shied away from making his feelings known. The man who once said he couldn’t hear Jeremy Roenick yapping because his two Stanley Cup rings were stuck in his ears is not one to hold back.
If Lambert played things close to the vest, and did he ever, Roy is more likely to doff the vest and throw it on the ice to protest a call. He’s fiery, clever, passionate, opinionated and unfiltered, and without the I’m-SO-much-smarterthan-you John Tortorella superciliousness.
Which means, in this first-round redux, there’s at least something new and different. The Islanders are one point better than they were a year ago (94 points to 93) and squeezed their way in by winning eight of their final nine, but it’s largely the same roster, the same faces, with the same goalie tandem. But the one new and famous face behind the bench should make things a little more entertaining than a year ago, whether through word or deed.
The Hurricanes haven’t changed all that much, but they’ll look different to the Islanders too: With a healthy Frederik Andersen in net — he appeared in only one game, Game 6, and won it, a year ago — and Andrei Svechnikov on the ice instead of sounding the Game 1 siren and
Jake Guentzel and Evgeny Kuznetsov in this uniform, the Hurricanes are bringing more weapons than they did a year ago.
So if you were dreading another series with the Islanders, and the puck coming down bang before the other guys and the arm going up and the game stopping then starting, fair enough. But there’s enough novelty on the ice and behind the bench to maybe shake things up a little. Something will get stirred up, somehow, and when it does, it won’t be at all like the passive-aggressive defense of Jean-Gabriel Pageau’s slash that broke Teravainen’s thumb.
The Hurricanes, a heavy favorite, may make easier work of the Islanders this time around. (They may not!) But if nothing else, it should be a heck of a lot more entertaining than last April.
Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at tinyurl.com/lukeslatest to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.
Luke DeCock’s Latest: Never miss a column on the Canes, ACC or other Triangle sports
Luke DeCock: 919-829-8947, @LukeDeCock