Have the Hurricanes simply been unlucky in recent years?
The Carolina Hurricanes have developed a reputation over the course of the Rod Brind’Amour era as a team that excels in the regular season but can’t get it done in the playoffs.
The Hurricanes have made the playoffs in each of Brind’Amour’s eight seasons, and they’ve won at least one round in each of those postseasons. That gives them the fourth-longest streak of years winning a round behind only the Broad Street Bully Flyers and two different eras of the Montreal Canadiens.
But in Brind’Amour’s eight years and three Eastern Conference Final appearances, the Canes have never won more than one game in the East final.
Running into the 2019 Boston Bruins and 2023 and 2025 Florida Panthers certainly made for tough draws, and while the individual games in those series were close at times
The narrative explaining these failures has boiled down to a lack of top-end offensive talent and poor goaltending. In reality, Sebastian Aho, Seth Jarvis and Andrei Svechnikov all produce quite well in the playoff environment, and Frederik Andersen has been solid enough in net, with a .909 save percentage and 2.02 goals against average during his Carolina tenure in the playoffs.
On Friday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, host Tyler Yaremchuk and co-host and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton discussed whether or not Carolina’s playoff shortcomings are as striking as they appear on the surface.
Tyler Yaremchuk: I look back because, again, the narrative for them has always been all they don’t have that big great offensive game changer. I dug back through the last couple of postseasons here, and some of their key players… two years ago both Aho and Svechnikov in the playoffs were point-per-game players. Both Svechnikov and Jarvis saw their points per game increase from the regular season to the postseason. You go back to last year where, again, they go on a long run they play 15 playoff games. Both Jarvis and Aho above a point per game production in the postseason, and Svechnikov was right there with 8ight goals in 15 games. I’m starting to think that maybe that narrative that it’s their star play that let them down, maybe that’s not quite true. Maybe it is more of a comment on the depth of this Carolina team or maybe, and I think sometimes hockey fans just don’t really like to admit this, Hutts, maybe they’re just a little unlucky. When you look at a playoff series, and I know the hockey world absolutely clowned Rod Brind’Amour a few years back when they got swept and he sat at the podium and said, ‘I know we got swept, but it didn’t feel like a sweep. That wasn’t a sweep.’ The margins are so thin that maybe we shouldn’t be labeling this team as a team that can’t get it done. Maybe they’re, you know, going on good runs and just getting a bit unlucky at the end.
Carter Hutton: Yeah, I think at times it is just shows the parity, right? Where like if we’re sitting here in a league that is so hard to win in in the regular season, and you’re structured by cap and draft picks and it’s very hard to know what you’re gonna get from year to year because of the predictability is just out the window. Like, the New Jersey Devils would be in the playoffs in the Western Conference, right? It just goes to show you like getting in and just having a seat at the table is the top priority, and for a lot of these teams it’s kind of catching lightning in a bottle. Whether it’s a trade like the Florida Panthers getting Brad Marchand or Bobrovsky going around. You think of the year that they went Alex Lyon carried them, like, you need this perfect recipe which is really hard to predict year to year, and for Carolina eight years straight now to the playoffs. Hopefully this is the year that things line up for them because they have the talent. They have the structure, now they just need those peak moments in in those big games and find ways to win.
You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode below…