The best way to start this off would be to say that if you’re happy the Washington Capitals drew the Carolina Hurricanes in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs, you should probably pump the brakes and postpone those thoughts about the second round — at least for a while.
The Washington Capitals matchup with the Carolina Hurricanes might’ve seemed the most attractive on paper, especially when when the other options were the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Columbus Blue Jackets. But rest assured, the Hurricanes aren’t a team that snuck into the playoffs by chance.
Carolina has been a darling of sorts in year’s past, consistently picked as the league’s “sleeper” team, always poised to make a run into the playoffs and take the league with style. After years of waiting (10 years, to be exact) the Hurricanes put together enough offense and rode the wave of momentum in a feel-good story all the way into the playoffs.
They rallied around the their postgame celebrations and caught the league by, well, Storm. They were called a “Bunch of Jerks,” by old friend and notorious fun-hater Don Cherry and turned it into an rallying cry.
But all of that is a sideshow compared to just how good the Carolina Hurricanes are. Although they made the playoffs by three points with 99 and just narrowly avoided having to play 128-point Tampa Bay in the first round, they’re stocked with talent and leadership and offense. They’re captained by Justin Williams. They’re coached by Rod Brind’Amour. And they’re one hell of a hockey team.
And the way they got here is with a heavy, heavy dose of offense.
Offense
Quite simply, Carolina Hurricanes are one of the most potent teams in the National Hockey League at generating offense.
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Throughout the entire season, only one team ranked higher, the San Jose Sharks, than the Hurricanes in terms of Corsi Percentage at 5 on 5. (Note: All numbers are at 5 on 5 play) The Hurricanes finished the entire season with a 54.8 percent Corsi. Since the All-Star Break, right around the time the Capitals kicked their season into gear the Hurricanes remained steadfast with a 54.13 percent rating.
They’re also one of the game’s most exciting teams, with 4,273 CF events this season, good for third in the league. In layman’s terms, they pepper every goalie they play.
But a Corsi rating doesn’t win a series, as teams are prone to figure out. What these numbers can show us, however, is how dangerous the Hurricanes are with the puck.
The Hurricanes led the NHL with 3.1 Expected Goals For (or xGF) per game, which is a neat statistic designed to show us how many goals a team can expect to score based on the shots they take and the percentages that are attached to them. For example, if the Capitals take 30 wrist shots from the blue line, their xGF would be lower than the Hurricanes xGF if they take 25 wrist shots from in between the faceoff dots, despite the fact that the Capitals shot attempts, or Corsi, may be higher. There will be more on this later in the week, but this isn’t a particularly strong matchup for the Capitals.
A particular reason why the Hurricanes led the league in that category was where they shoot the puck from. Hint: Braden Holtby is going to be a busy man this series. Through the entire season, the Hurricanes were fourth in the NHL in High-Danger Corsi For percentage at 54.74 percent. High-Danger Corsi For percentage (or HDCF%) is exactly what it sounds like. The Hurricanes are one of the league’s elite teams when it comes to getting shots at the net from where you want them, right up close to the goalie.
Illustrated another way, through Micah Blake McCurdy on HockeyViz.com (side note: consider supporting his site today. He does great work, and provides the numbers and graphs that I’m using as I write this). The heat map for the Hurricanes shows a lot of red in front of the opposing goalie. The reason? That’s where their shots come from.
But to get away from the “advanced” statistics for a few moments, the Hurricanes only ranked 16th in actual goals (245) and 20th on the powerplay (17.8 percent). For a team with the puck as much as the Hurricanes, those numbers are expected to be a lot higher. We can expect, for example, that if the Capitals had these sort of underlying numbers for 82 games, their record would’ve been better than the 48-26-8 record they posted.
So why weren’t the Canes in a playoff spot all season long? The answer for that lies in the team’s shooting percentage at five-on-five, which is at a low 7.17 percent, all the way down at 28th in the league. Therein lies the conundrum with the Carolina Hurricanes — they’re one of the best teams in the league at generating offense, it’s putting the puck in the net that gives them problems.
Sebastian Aho finished with 30 goals, yet Williams, Teuvo Teravainen and Andrei Svechnikov finished with 23, 21 and 20 goals, respectively. They only had seven players score 15 or more goals. To contrast, the Capitals had seven players score 20 or more goals — although the eighth (and ninth) players on the roster tallied 13. Those players carry the water for the Hurricanes on the offensive side of the ice, but there’s a real lack of high-end scoring there for the Hurricanes too. That’s not to say they’re not talented, because they very much are, but they’ve never had a game-changing, consistent force at scoring goals.
Since 2014-15, the Hurricanes have ranked: 29th, 24th, 20th, 28th and now 28th again in shooting percentage. They’ve always been good at generating offense, they’ve just never been good at producing the statistical proof that people associate with offense. All of that plays into their hands on the defensive end, where they’re a product of their offense’s success.
Defense
The Hurricanes operate under the simple lesson, “The best defense is a good offense.” Because as the Hurricanes have learned, it’s hard to give up goals if you have the puck in the other team’s end for the majority of the game. Although their offense is the reason why they’ve drawn everyone’s attention, the defense actually ranks higher in goals allowed with 223. That is good enough for sixth in the league. Not to credit their offense with everything, because they boast a very good top four with Jaccob Slavin and Dougie Hamilton patrolling the first pair and Brett Pesce and Justin Faulk on the second.
Carolina’s defense, however, is absolutely penetrable though. They allowed the 10th most High-Danger chances this season, only cancelled out due to their incredibly potent offense. They ranked sixth in the league in Corsi Allowed, which shows they’re not only strong at creating chances, but preventing them, too. They’re a fairly middle of the pack team when it comes to Expected Goals Allowed (xGA), and ranked 16th with 2.42.
Overall
Puck possession is going to be a crucial part of this series. One of the reasons the Hurricanes are incredibly dangerous, especially in the postseason, is that they’re able to control the puck for the majority of games. There will be more stories later this week that dive into that, but the long and short of it is Washington’s skill won’t matter a ton if Carolina can control the puck for most of the series.
One of the reasons Washington won the Stanley Cup last season was their dramatic improvement in the numbers listed above against high-quality teams in the Eastern Conference. In order for the Capitals to advance against the Hurricanes, they’ll once again need to mitigate some of the chances that the Hurricanes have generated for the entirety of the 2018-19 season, and let the skill of the forward group shine through.
*Statistics are found at Evolving-Hockey.com, Naturalstattrick.com, Hockeyviz.com.*