It took just one minute and 17 seconds midway through the third period for the Carolina Hurricanes to utterly collapse inside PNC Arena Tuesday night, as the Boston Bruins overcame a 4-1 deficit to eventually beat Carolina 6-4.
The Hurricanes (30-29-11) played a great 50 minutes of hockey to put themselves into a position to win, but followed that up with a final 10 minutes that was emblematic of the season as a whole; hope of anything other than continued failure being completely squandered.
“I’m still kind of stunned really,” Canes forward Justin Williams said. “Things can go so right for 50 minutes, and you can dig in and do all the things right and then you let one goal turn into another one, turn into another one. I don’t know what else to say.”
With 10:04 left to play in the game, Boston (44-16-8) defenseman Matt Grzelcyk beat Canes goalie Cam Ward, who stopped 28 of 33 shots on the night, up high to shrink the Carolina lead to 4-2. Fifty-six seconds later, forward David Pastrnak sniped the puck off the crossbar and into the net to make it 4-3. Just 21 seconds after that, forward Danton Heinen slotted away a beautiful pass from center David Krejci to complete the abrupt comeback.
“I don’t really know how to explain what just happened,” Canes defenseman Justin Faulk said. “We’re in a position where we are trying to scratch and claw. Our backs are against the wall. We’re playing tight. We aren’t playing loose and we are probably not playing with much confidence as a whole.”
Pastrnak broke the 4-4 tie later in the third period, converting a power-play goal after Faulk sent the puck over the glass and was assessed a delay of game. Pastrnak sealed his hat trick and the Carolina tomb with an empty-net goal, as the large contingent of Boston fans in the building poured hats over the boards and onto the ice.
Williams, who was almost at a loss for words after the game, shouldered some of the responsibility for what is one of the uglier losses the franchise has seen, while expressing what a loss like this feels like for a team.
“It’s beyond anger to be honest,” Williams said. “We’ve got thousands of Boston fans cheering for them when we’re at home. It’s a product of what’s happening. It’s beyond upsetting. We’ve got to look at ourselves and know that we’re responsible for what we’ve done at this point.”
Before Boston mounted its comeback, the Canes were playing good hockey. In a game that featured nine combined penalties, Carolina made the most of the special-teams opportunities to take what appeared to be a comfortable 4-1 lead.
The Hurricanes tallied twice on the power play, as forwards Sebastian Aho and Teuvo Teravainen, each assisted by the other, both scored with the man advantage in the second period.
Aho, who drew the penalty on Pastrnak, received a feed from Teravainen at the top of the circle and slotted it through traffic and over the shoulder of Bruins goalie Tuukka Rask, who stopped 29 of Carolina’s 33 shots, to tie things at 1-1 after Boston forward Brad Marchand netted the opener with 10.4 seconds remaining in the first.
Later in the period, Teravainen capitalized on a 5-on-3 advantage, beating Rask to his high-glove side on the power play to take a 2-1 lead. Williams added a tap-in goal in the second, after forward Brock McGinn beat Rask with a hard shot and the puck got by him to the stick of Williams.
“Just a nice shot from Sebastian there,” Faulk said. “We were lucky — well not necessarily lucky but it doesn’t happen often — to get a 5-on-3. Just a good shot by [Teravainen]. They came up big, I guess, at that part of the game when we thought it was needed.”
A shorthanded goal to open up the third period for McGinn, thanks to the hustle of forward Elias Lindholm who forced a turnover, put the Canes up 4-1.
From there, it all fell apart for the Hurricanes.
With the loss, the Canes have now dropped 10 of their last 13 games, including four of their last five. After flirting with a playoff spot for the majority of the season, Carolina is trending in the completely wrong direction with the season winding down, and finds itself seven points out of the Eastern Conference’s second wild-card spot with an extra game played.
Canes head coach Bill Peters, who said next to nothing post game, did talk about the need to recover from this one and see how the playoff hunt shaped out.
“We gotta watch, see it unfold,” Peters said. “There are ways to recover, and we will see if we do it.”
The Canes will get a few days off now, before returning to PNC Arena to host the Philadelphia Flyers on Saturday. Carolina has been a streaky team all season, but with the playoff hopes all but lost the need to bounce back from this loss is imperative.
“A few too many times where we’ve had situations where we have to say ‘how do we regroup from this,’” Faulk said. “You guys know, we know, everyone knows where we are at in the standings. You want to sit here and say ‘yeah, we’re going to come back here and regroup.’ You have to. That’s the bottom line.”
