Thanks for spending some time with us on a Thursday afternoon when the hurricane season is no longer. I'm glad we stopped the highlights right there because we stopped the highlights before the depression set in. That was very good.
No Victoria to share in our misery. I am Adam Gold. This is the Adam Gold show and Graham is here. What up, Graham?
What's going on, Adam? Trying to find a little positivity. I got positivity for you all the time. Carolina had a great season.
They did. Crappy end, but a great season and there's really no other. You don't have to look at it any other way. I'm not going to self-medicate and say that, well, this is about as far as they should have gone. I think it's emotional and it's raw and sometimes people don't want to admit things, but there were deficiencies to the team that really didn't even I think necessarily you couldn't fix through a trade. There are certain things about the roster that I think need to be addressed. We'll get to those, but that was a series that Carolina could have won even though they were not the better team in the series. Could they have won game one? Yes, they could have won game one.
Seven over times, well, seven periods of hockey. The Hurricanes had plenty of opportunities to win, so they could have won game one. Could they have won game two? Oh yeah, could have definitely won game two. It went to overtime. Could have won game two.
Didn't. Could they have won game three? Yep, could have won game three. One goal was scored on the power play by Florida. It was probably Carolina's best game of the series. Didn't score a goal. Could they have won last night? Yep, could have won last night. They were beaten with 4.9 seconds left on the clock and we could debate all day long whether or not the goal should have been allowed. We'll get to all of that, but they didn't win the game. I mean, they keep score.
We keep score. It's not a boxing match where, okay, well, the champ wasn't knocked out, so we go to the judge's scorecards. Hey, if we went to the judge's scorecards, you could make the argument that Carolina, I don't know, maybe they would have won. I don't think so, but it was certainly a very close series and it doesn't necessarily reflect in the final count because it was four-nothing in favor of Florida. But I don't, if you are of the mind that, well, that's about as far as Carolina should have gone, you know what?
Stop it. That was a series that they could have won. Could have easily been three-nothing in Carolina's favor. Easily. Yeah, I disagree with Rod in that respect, right?
Here's the way I look at it, and we're going to go through some sound bites here, and Jeff O'Neill is going to join us in about 11 minutes, among other people today. Sports almost always comes down to big moments. Team sports, individual sports, doesn't matter. If you watch enough NBA basketball, right, how often do we see the better team trailing by eight going into the fourth quarter? No sweat. They got this. It happens. It happens. The most meaningless stat in the world is the score at halftime. The better teams kind of figure it out.
It comes down to moments. It comes down to a big pitch, a big at-bat in baseball, a third-down conversion in football. And while those are not as easily defined in hockey, if you look back on the big moments in this series, Florida pretty much won them. They scored the big goal. Carolina didn't. They converted on the power play. Carolina didn't. I mean, that's ultimately what it came down to. It came down to Florida had a little bit more, and that is the reality of the Carolina Hurricanes as this team is built. Florida just had a little bit more.
Before we play the Bugles, I will simply ask honesty here. Even going into the series, this is not about who played well. If you listed the best players in this series going in, how far down the list until we get to a Hurricanes player?
I'm not saying it's number eight, but an eight higher than three. Going into the series, the two best players on the rosters were Matthew Kachuk and Alexander Barkoff. They both had big series. Carolina's best player, Sebastian Aja or Jacob Slavin, either one.
You could choose either one. They both had good series. Not great series, but they both had good series. But that is Carolina's best player.
And then after that, we're probably listing three or four more Florida Panthers. And we haven't even mentioned the goalie who played out of his mind. So I think the better team in the series won, while Carolina could have won. Could and should are different. Could have won, yes. The moments were there for the Hurricanes to grab, and they didn't. Maybe they couldn't. I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that, but we got a lot of stuff. Bugle time. They say it's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop, right? It's not the fall. You're fine. It's a good way of putting it, right? You're not.
You're fine. And when Matthew Kuchuk scored with 4.9 seconds left, it was a kick, not in the teeth, right in the hockey pucks. That's the way it felt to everybody who was hoping that the Hurricanes could drag this into overtime and maybe get the bounce that they were starting to get.
Think about the goals that were scored. It was in a double deflection off the post. The puck lying behind Sergei Bobrovsky and Paul Stasny sweeps it in.
By the way, I had Stasny anytime goal score yesterday. Then the Tevo Terravinin. It's a shot from Brady Shea. Gets blocked on the way in, but breaks the stick of Colin White. Falls to the slot.
Tevo Terravinin. Boom. Roofs it.
By the way, go to school on that, people. Been saying it since game two. High. Shoot. High.
Low ain't working. Sick and tired of watching shots hit Bobrovsky in the pants, in the crest. You had to aim at the bar. Tevo Terravinin tucked it just under the crossbar.
You weren't always going to score if you shot high, but pretty much you were never going to score if you shot low. And then Jesper Faust. Great play by Jordan Martinuk and others behind the net. Martinuk shovels it in front.
It caroms off of Sam Bennett and just lays there. Faust basically reached through Bennett's legs and just chopped at it and it goes over Bobrovsky and in. So there was starting to be some juice for that flipping. And then I cannot believe that they made that call. The tripping call on Jordan's stall was, as I tried to use the phrase, in game three. Well, it was callable, but there wasn't a ton there. And it had no bearing on anything.
And the hand went up and the hand went up almost with glee. And this was a minute, less than a minute after Anthony Duclair checked Brett Pesci from behind after the puck had left in the exact same spot. There's no way you make that call. No way.
No way. And Jordan's stall goes to the box and here's Jordan on the tripping penalty. Yeah, it was a stupid penalty, obviously. I had one out of my stick. My stick went against my leg and then hit his leg. I don't think I really hit him very hard, but apparently hard enough for him to fall down. So it wasn't a very good penalty. It wasn't fun being in the box. All right. Again, was it callable? Yep, it was callable, but there wasn't a lot there. This is the sport that invented.
Oh man. Third period. We put the whistles away. They invented that. Nope.
Not last night. Apparently that crap got called. And again, rule book.
Look at the rule book. Yep. That's a trip. Garbage.
And then you give up the power to play golf. What hurts the most about this is that is because it was so borderline, but again, rule book. It's a trip. Very difficult way for, I think, Carolina to lose.
Let's get to some, some positivity about this. Jesper Fosse scored big goals in the post season and a little bit of forecasting forward later in the show. Remember he had the old overtime game winner in game two against the Islanders. He had the series ending goal, right? Against the devils in overtime. And he scored with three 22 left in the game last night. He led Carolina in goals in the post season. If I had told you that Jesper Fosse would lead the hurricanes and goals in the post season, you probably would have said, well, that's going to be a short post season because that can't happen. But he did. He had six goals in 15 games.
I mean, I don't even know how to process that, but I will tell you this, and we are going to talk about a little bit of the future coming up later on in the program. That guy has to come back. He is a free agent after the year. Jesper Fosse has to be on this team. He's not an old player. He's still very effective. If Jesper Fosse is running around on a checking line, you can sprinkle him in playing up.
I've been saying this for years. Jesper Fosse can play higher in your lineup. You are absolutely a better team with Jesper Fosse on it. He is not going to be an expensive player. It will not take a long term contract to keep him. Jesper Fosse needs to be on this team. All right, real quick before we get to Jeff O'Neill. When Fosse scored the goal to make it 3-3, there was every sense that Carolina was in a good spot, at least in the game.
Here is the head coach. I felt great about the game, other than the start, the way we started coming on. I felt like all the other games, to be honest with you.
I'm just really proud of the group and how hard they worked. I deserved a better fate, I think so, to be quite honest. You asked me how we were going to respond to this game. It was exactly what happened. Guys went down, we were losing our best players. We just kept playing.
The seed I had was a pretty good game. Pretty impressive effort. It's the way we've been all year in these four games. It's a tough way to end it.
That's going to be tough, for sure. I'm just proud of what we've built here and the guys that we have in there. That was a very big picture from Rod Brindamore, but I think there was a sense that Carolina was in a good spot after Fosse scored the goal. Of course, we had the Jacob Slavin injury early in the first period.
That was a killer on multiple fronts. It was a tone-setter for the Panthers. I believe it rattled the Hurricanes for most, if not all, of the first period. That's with the reality that the Hurricanes did get out of the period only down 2-1. I was a little concerned going into the game.
I talked about it with the head coach before as we were getting ready for the storm watch. Was he concerned that guys would try to do too much? Sebastian Ajo played the first period almost in an angry panic, especially after that hit. Ajo was all over the place. He was all over the place in kind of an undisciplined way.
It was kind of concerning for me. I think he reined it in. I don't know that Ajo was ever great in the game. He was better. Ajo was, I think, good probably in the last 30 minutes of the game. He was dominant for the first 30 or so minutes of Game 1. We never got that from Sebastian Ajo in Game 4 when the Hurricanes desperately needed it.
They gave themselves a chance, but in that first period after Slavin went down, and real quick thought on the hit. Sam Bennett is an edgy, cross the line at times because that's how he plays type of a player. Players, by the way, like that help you win. Sometimes they hurt you.
There's no question. You run that risk of a player going too far. That hit, while there was helmet to helmet contact, absolutely. I think the intent was a clean hit.
I don't really have a problem with that. There was helmet to helmet contact. I guess that could have been called if it were helmet to helmet contact. By and large, Slavin was kind of searching for the puck at his feet. Bennett, the puck was right there, so that's a clean hit. That's a legal hit. Bennett didn't leave his feet. He didn't finish high.
Just natural human momentum carries your arm up. I had no problem with that. My only issue was there was definitely helmet to helmet contact. Because of that, could it have been called? Yeah, it could have. They certainly could have called a penalty. They would have had to call a major to go to video. What I didn't understand is how Carolina ended up shorthanded in that situation, but ultimately that's what happened. They ended up shorthanded.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-05-25 17:08:50 / 2023-05-25 17:14:39 / 6
