We are at the point of the season where the Hurricanes are playing for draft position and all winning will do is impact that negatively. The fact that it got to this point is sad, but this is what happens when you manage to win only one out of fifteen games during the most important time of the year. I'm not the type of person who roots for a team to tank the rest of the season but wins and losses are all but meaningless right now, so all I am going to be looking from here on out is for the Canes to play well and try to salvage anything from a dismal season. No one wanted it to end up this way, but getting an elite talent out of this year's draft could make the frustration from this season meaningless in the long-run.

With all of that in mind, you couldn't help but want to see the Hurricanes pull one out against Washington last night because it was a game that they played well enough to win. They obviously didn't play a flawless game, but they produced over 25 scoring chances and got a great performance in net from Justin Peters, so this was a good opportunity for the Canes to get out of this funk. The one thing that kept them from winning this game was the play of Washington goaltender Braden Holtby, who stopped 43 of the 44 shots he saw to steal this game for the Caps. I know the excuse of "running into a hot goalie" is getting old, but what else can you say about last night's game? The Canes played a solid game, put forth a great effort and probably deserved better than the result they got. That's just how things have been working out for them this season, though. Either the goaltending takes them out of games early and when they actually do get good goaltending, they can't buy a goal at the other end. 

Losing isn't the worst thing in the world at this point in the year, but when you have only one win in your last 15 games, it's really frustrating to watch defeats like this from a fan's perspective and the players are likely even more frustrated right now.

A few days ago, I wrote on the subject of PDO and how it has gone downhill for the Hurricanes over these last few weeks. It basically showed that the Hurricanes have been going through a stretch of awful luck lately and that the team is better than what they have showed during this losing streak. In a full season, PDO regresses toward the mean of 1.000 for most teams, but this is obviously not a normal season and there was bound to be some fluky things happening. Take the Toronto Maple Leafs for instance, they are currently shooting at over 10% at even strength and while that will probably crash back down to Earth in a full year, it's enough to propel them into the playoffs now. Same with the Ottawa Senators, who have a team save percentage of over .930 and are in good position to make the playoffs despite losing their two best players. If not for their unreal goaltending, they probably wouldn't be in this situation. Luck is going to play a huge factor this year, which is why I'm hestiant to overreact to whatever the results are.

That being said, the Hurricanes recent skid is something that would get them into trouble even during a full-season. Every team has 8-9 game stretches where they can't buy a goal or go through a bad losing streak, but when you win only one game out of 13, that's going to put you in a hole no matter what. The Hurricanes underlying numbers from this season might show that they are a good team, but it's hard to call what we are seeing right now a "good team that's just unlucky." There has to be more to it than this.

Since this is a little delayed, I figured that I should try out a new experiment with my statistical recaps instead of just going over the scoring chances. I usually track those every game and present them here to show who had the edge in the territorial battle, but that's only one part of what I've been tracking all season. One goal that hockey statisticians have aimed to accomplish for years is to quantify every part of the game and while doing that here is feasibly impossible (only so much work one person can do), there's a lot of information that I chart down during games but I don't share a lot of in my recaps because there is a lot of stuff I can't track live. School reasons kept me from watching this game, so I was able to get everything tracked for this game and will share it with you all after the jump.

As for the game itself, it was yet another loss and the Hurricanes were overpowered by a superior Penguins team. They actually managed to hang tough with them for most of the game and took the lead in the third period, but the Pens were able to get a couple of quick goals and coast away with the win. This was far from the Hurricanes worst performance of the losing streak but they were clearly not the better team and deserved the loss. Not much else to say about this one, but I'll let the numbers do the talking.

Once again, the Canes were facing a team that did not bring their best game but were on the receiving end of another blowout loss because they could get a timely save from either of their goalies or buy a goal at the other end. This is the same thing that has happened to them over the last four weeks or so and the whole process is getting tiring because the outcome of most of their games is becoming too predictable. It doesn't matter how well the Canes played in terms of territorial domination or scoring chances because the fact that they can't score and are getting below-replacement level goaltending completely nullifies that, which is exactly what went wrong last night.

The Hurricanes actually started this game on a very strong note. Their game-plan was to forecheck strong, make it difficult for Boston to exit their zone and create chances off forcing turnovers & winning board battles. They did a fine job of this to start the game by getting five consecutive scoring chances in the first three and a half minutes. Then the Bruins were able to generate a transition chance the other way and scored on their second shot of the game after Justin Peters lost track of a rebound that Rich Peverley deposited underneath him. This didn't seem to phase Carolina that much, though as they continued to tran Boston in their own zone for the next few minutes of the game. Then the Bruins got another transition chance and Brad Marchand scored after Peters failed to control another rebound in the crease.

When you have a good start but can't score and end up trailing 2-0 or 3-0 thanks to terrible goaltending, it deflates the entire team and the Hurricanes obviously didn't recover from it last night. Add in Tuukka Rask giving the Bruins the early saves they needed and the team's confidence was shot heading into the first intermission. They continued to battle for the rest of the game, but it was an uphill climb and the game was far out of reach by the time the Hurricanes finally put home their first goal of the game. It's been the same old story for the past two weeks and I'm at a loss for words at what needs to be done about this.

The Hurricanes are basically a PDO nightmare right now and have been for the last couple of weeks. The goaltending has fallen apart since Dan Ellis injured his leg and rushed back from it and they aren't scoring right now either. The team is getting chances, but not finishing and I'm not sure what else they can do about that. They are stuck with Ellis/Peters for the time being and the goals just aren't coming no matter who they are facing in net. It's made every recent game look like a disaster scene and how to fix it is anyone's guess.

After going most of the season without a collective scapegoat, Hurricanes fans seemed to have found one in defenseman Jamie McBain. The entire team is struggling right now, but he has been taking a lot of heat from the fans ever since Carolina went on their brutal losing streak. The hate reached a new high after his brutal showing against the Winnipeg Jets two weeks ago where he was on-ice for two goals against, one of which he put in his own net. Most of the criticism he has been taking lately has been deserved since his mistakes are costing the team a lot more right now and he has the tendency to get caught in no-man's land more than others. He has also been on-ice for seven even strength goals in his last nine games after being on-ice for only seven in his first 20.

Like I said earlier, the entire team is struggling right now but McBain seems to be a step behind the entire team right now for whatever reason. Some say that he has never been good, but it wasn't too long ago when people were talking about how he had the highest plus-minus rating among the defense corps and how he has become better defensively than in year's past. His underlying numbers also show that he hasn't been terribly better or worse than he was last season, so why is it now that everyone wants him run out of town? Personally, I think it all relates back to Justin Faulk's injury and how McBain's role has changed since then.

It was only a month ago when the Hurricanes were in the driver's seat in the Southeast Division and basically all they needed to do was gain points in a little under 60% of their games to make it in. Since that point, the Canes have gone 3-11-1 and are now in the running for a top-five pick rather than a playoff spot. This free fall was something that even I didn't see coming because, as I have often reiterated here, the Hurricanes have been one of the better teams in the NHL at controlling puck-possession this season. This is usually what leads to success in the NHL, but not all the time. Goaltending, shooting luck and injuries are going to keep some good teams out of the playoffs this year because there are fewer games to make up for lost ground. The Hurricanes have been hit especially hard by the injury bug this year, but they've also seen a lot of other things go wrong for them as of late. This is evidenced by taking a look at their PDO over the season. 

For those who don't know what PDO is, it's the sum of a team's even strength shooting and save percentages and shows how lucky or unlucky a team has gotten. A PDO over 1.000 shows that a team has gotten very fortunate while a team with a PDO under 1.00 shows that they may have gotten a few bounces that have gone against them. Carolina's PDO has stayed stagnant for most of the year, but recently it has taken a nose dive. Looking at it over five-game segments shows this team's fall from grace pretty well.

Last night's game was a good chance for the Hurricanes to get a win. They were going up against a Rangers team who just played an overtime game the previous night, had to travel and were starting the same goalie in a back-to-back situation on top of that. This seemed like a good chance for the Canes to right the sinking ship that is their season, but as you probably know, nothing has been going their way as of late and that trend continued last night. They outplayed a tired Rangers team during five-on-five play and ended up losing 4-1 because of a few reasons with the biggest one being the reigning Vezina Trophy winner Henrik Lundqvist. He was a brick wall last night, stopping 48 of 49 shots and 27 of 28 scoring chances. Goalies usually perform poorly in back-to-back starts, but I guess that rule doesn't apply to the King.

If you had flashbacks to the Tampa Bay game where Ben Bishop stoned the Hurricanes then I don't blame you because Lundqvist was just as good, if not better. It might be a tough sell to fans to say that goaltending was the difference in a 4-1 loss, but it was when you consider how much the Hurricanes controlled play at even strength. The Canes did basically everything they could to beat Lundqvist and couldn't solve him until the third period when they were already trailing 3-0. When you are facing a goalie who is playing as well as Lundqvist, the margin for error becomes smaller and smaller by the game, which makes mistakes like Dan Ellis vacating the net to give Ryan Callahan an open goal to shoot at hurt so much more.

That's just the way things have gone for the Hurricanes as of late, though. They managed to put up a huge offensive performance without their best winger in the lineup and don't get rewarded for it because they ran into an elite goaltender. It's frustrating to watch from a fan's standpoint and I can bet the players are probably even more infuriated with how the last three games have turned out. The Hurricanes probably deserved better than the 4-1 loss they took but they also made a lot of mistakes to help seal their fate.

15 goals. That is all the Hurricanes have gotten from players not in their top-six this season and it's probably even lower than that if you take away special teams goal. Scoring depth is something that I did not think would be a problem for the Canes this year, but it's a pretty big issue right now. Their top line has accounted for a little under 45% of the team's overall goals and 33 of the 55 non-empty net goals they've scored during five-on-five play. As nice as it is to have a potent first line, the other players really need to produce to help take some of the burden on them. 

The Hurricanes might possess one of the best first lines in the NHL right now, but they aren't going to score every night, so the other lines are going to need to pick up the slack and they haven't done that lately. Jordan Staal's line with Jeff Skinner are somewhat guilty of this, too but I'm more willing to give them a pass because they have been productive in terms of creating scoring chances. The third and fourth lines, however, have not been so innocent.

The last time a Hurricanes third liner produced a goal was on March 16th against the Washington Capitals when Patrick Dwyer deflected in a point shot from Jay Harrison and the ONLY time a Carolina fourth liner scored came all the way back in early February when Tim Wallace scored against the Islanders. The Canes bottom two lines have gone through a lot of changes this year, but when you have only one total goal all season from an entire line, then that's not good. Even if a lot of fourth lines aren't depended on for scoring. Compare the Hurricanes scoring numbers with the rest of the league and you can see that they lean on their top-six a lot more than the majority of the NHL.

This is coming a few days late thanks to Game Center Live's 48-hour blackout rule, but I just wanted to get the scoring chance numbers from the Washington game up so that everyone can see them. It was one of the few games of the losing streak that Carolina probably "deserved" to win but ended up on the losing end because of a terrible performance in net by Justin Peters & Dan Ellis. Despite greatly outplaying Washington for two-thirds of the game, the Canes were trailing 5-3 and then Washington was able to settle things down and force the Canes to play their game. The Canes were guilty of some bad defensive breakdowns on a couple of the Washington goals, but they had limited the Caps to only 19 shots & 11 scoring chances. Allowing five goals on that kind of a workload is inexcusable on any goalie's part.

The Hurricanes played a good game but got a bad result and I was hoping they could at least build off this for Thursday night against Tampa Bay, which did not happen obviously.

The Hurricanes do not have many pleasant recent memories from games against the Tampa Bay Lightning and the 5-0 white-washing they took last night was just another chapter added to the book of what has been a painful three weeks for this team. It seems that each loss is more frustrating than the last and last night's game may have been the worst of the last 11 games, which is odd to say because the Hurricanes did not play as bad as the final score indicates. They certainly don't lose any points for work ethic from me, since they had a pretty huge territorial advantage over Tampa Bay in this game and fired 78 shots at the net during even strength play alone. The 45 that actually got on net were turned away by Tampa Bay's newly acquired goaltender Ben Bishop, who frustrated and shut down the Hurricanes all night to earn his second career shutout.

Sometimes there's nothing you can do when you run into a hot goalie and Bishop played as well as any goaltender that Carolina has faced this season. Considering that 24 of the shots he faced were scoring chances, I think it's fair to say that he was the main reason Tampa Bay won this game, but he also got a hefty amount of goal support from the team in front of him. Part of that was due to some shaky goaltending on the part of Dan Ellis and brutal defensive breakdowns by the Hurricanes in the third period. Ellis took the blame for the loss after the game and while the first and third goals he let in were awful, the Canes defense left him out to dry on the other three.

Tonight's game was pretty much a microcosm of what this entire season has been for the Hurricanes. They outplayed the Lightning in the first period but did not get rewarded for it, gave up an early goal in the second period and then everything just seemed to snowball after that. "Fragile" has been the word of choice to describe this team lately for this exact reason, since everything seems to become more difficult for them whenever they fall into a hole. I wouldn't say that they "give up" whenever they are in a tough spot, but I do notice that they get rattled easily, become too afraid to make mistakes and it results in them getting away from their game and leading to more mistakes. This is what I saw after the Hurricanes fell down 2-0 and it's becoming a common theme for this team lately. Bishop stopping everything thrown his way probably added to their frustration.

The Canes had no problem responding to adversity earlier in the season, so I'm not exactly sure what happened to them over the last three weeks. If a team is playing well but falls behind due to unfortunate circumstances, the coach's response is usually just to "stick to their game" and that hasn't been happening for awhile now. The team was able to win games despite their flaws earlier in the season but now it seems that all of their problems are insurmountable. I'm also not sure what Kirk Muller needs to do to fix this since it's been almost a month of these performances and we've yet to see much of a change. It's disappointing, but the end of this season really can't come soon enough for the Hurricanes. They are beaten up physically from all the injuries and mentally since nothing has gone their way for over three weeks. It might be easy from the fan's standpoint to tell them to "just suck it up and win the game," but hockey is a tough game and the Hurricanes are making things a lot more difficult than they need to be right now.