Carolina Hurricanes (20-25-10) at Colorado Avalanche (27-25-3)
Pepsi Center, 9 p.m.
TV: FS-Carolinas, Altitude

The Hurricanes have faced the Western Conference only 10 times this year and have a middling record of 4-4-2 against those teams. Out of who they have faced in the Western Conference, the division they have had the most success against it he Northwest as they are 2-1-0 against them with wins over the Vancouver Canucks and Edmonton Oilers. What this means is....well nothing really in the grand scheme of things. It's only three games and making conclusions based off that is just silly, but figured that the fans could use a confidence boost after that tough OT loss against Anaheim the other night.

If you want a real jolt of confidence for tonight's game, it's worth mentioning that the Canes are coming off one of their better road efforts of the season. They may have ended up taking the loss, but they played a solid game overall and will hopefully carry over that effort into tonight's game against the Avalanche.

The Avalanche are a better team than the Ducks so this will be a more difficult test for Carolina but they are coming off three strong games in a row, so their confidence has to be pretty high right now. There's only two games left to go in the road trip, so accumulating points now will be important. 

Lines & game notes after the jump

During the Hurricanes-Ducks telecast on FS-Carolina the other night, the announcers mentioned that Carolina defenseman Justin Faulk should be considered in the Calder Trophy race for the NHL's best rookie. If you watch the Hurricanes every night or follow them at all, you can certainly make a case for Faulk being one of the NHL's top rookies. He plays 20+ minutes a night, contributes on the powerplay, kills penalties and his game looks very impressive by the eye-test. For a kid that is only 19 years old, that is very impressive and it makes you wonder why he hasn't gotten much recognition around the league. Is this enough to take home the Calder, though? Unfortunately, probably not.

While I do think that Faulk's season has been overlooked by the national audience, the fact is that it is tough for defensemen to win the Calder. The only time a defenseman wins the Calder is when there is no real standouts among the forward class. Voters and fans are going to look at points before anything else and with players like Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Adam Henrique, Gabriel Landeskog, Matt Read and Cody Hodgson on pace for at least 40 points a piece, it will be tough for Faulk to stand out. He's also played fewer games than some of the other rookies so that probably hurts his Calder chances, too.

Rookie of the Year seems like a tough bet for Faulk but a good question is where does he rank among other rookie defensemen? Most coaches give their younger players easier ice-time against relatively weak competition to help them get a jump-start but we know that this hasn't been the case with Faulk. He and his partner Jay Harrison rank third and fourth respectively among Hurricanes defensemen in quality of competition, so we know that Faulk isn't getting soft minutes. What other rookie defensemen are doing this, though? We'll look into it after the jump.

It is always a bummer when a great game is decided on a horrible call and that is what happened tonight in the Canes 3-2 OT loss to the Anaheim Ducks. Both teams played a strong game and the Canes had one of their better road efforts of the year but unfortunately, they ended up walking away with only one point when it very well could have been two.

The call (or non-call I should say) in question occurred about three minutes into overtime when Jussi Jokinen was playing the puck behind the net. He was being chased by Anaheim forward Corey Perry behind the net and, in an attempt to strip the puck, Perry tripped Jokinen (and blatantly I might add) but referee Tim Peel let play continue as he saw no foul here. Perry was able to gain possession of the puck and The Ducks were quickly able to set up the play and Perry fired a one-timer past Ward to win it for Anaheim.

With how quick the game of hockey is and the human eye having it's limitations, bad calls are bound to happen but this was a non-call that directly led to a game-winning goal for Anaheim, so it's going to be awhile before Canes fans forget about this one. It's especially bad if you look at the play in question because the evidence doesn't exactly speak in Peel or Perry's favor. It was an awful call but I think it is best to be level-headed & reasonable in these situations. Humans make mistakes and this one is pretty big on Peel's part but we don't know for sure that Carolina would have won the game in OT or the shootout even if the call didn't happen. We can speculate but we don't know for sure. Either way, I think the best thing to do is to move on because this was truly a great game outside of that horrible call and I'd rather discuss that instead. Be upset. You have every right to be but in the end, you have to remember that it's only a hockey game and the outcome affects you only as much as you let it. As is the case with all sports. Letting this drag on for days, weeks & months isn't going to do much good.

Now that I have said all that I wanted to about Tim Peel and the non-call, let's talk about the other things that happened in the game because there's a lot of positive things for the Canes to build on here.

One of the bright spots for the Hurricanes this year has been Brandon Sutter's emergance as a shutdown defensive center but I still hear hockey pundits talk about how he has been a "disappointment." Whenever I hear that, I can't help but feel that these "experts" aren't watching the Hurricanes and are only looking at Sutter's 22 points in 54 games to judge his performance. What they don't see is all of the other contributions he makes to the team.

If you go by simple raw data, Sutter doesn't appear to be that impressive. He has only 12 goals, 22 points and a 44.6% scoring chance rate, but the truth is that Sutter has been one of the Canes most important players this year. Sutter's defensive game and responsibility has improved by a lot and you have to look deep into certain stats to see this.

We'll explore this more after the jump.

One of the fun things you can do when your team changes coaches about a quarter way through the season is compare how the new guy is performing compared to who is replacing. The general consensus among Carolina fans is that new coach Kirk Muller is doing a fantastic job and is more suited for this team than Paul Maurice. Despite those claims, the Hurricanes performance under Muller hasn't changed much compared to how they played under Maurice. They are controlling possession at about the same rate and are only roughly a win better under Muller, and that extra win likely came from Cam Ward standing on his head for all of January.

However, I think it is safe to say that the Hurricanes main issue is talent and not coaching because you can only do so much with players like Jiri Tlusty and Alexei Ponikarovsky in your top-six and a defense corps where Tim Gleason is your best player. Muller can't control who he has on the team but what he can do is control how he uses them. With the help of Time On Ice's "team faceoff" option, we can look at how the Hurricanes two coaches this year have been using their players by seeing how often they deploy them in the offensive and defensive zone respectively. You will see some huge differences between Muller and Maurice's strategies.

This was certainly a strange week for the Canes when you compare their shot data to scoring chances because while they were heavily outshot this past week, they actually outchanced their opponents overall. A large reason for this is because of the 47-save shutout they had against the Bruins last Thursday. That was a game where they were outshot by a wide-margin but a lot of the Bruins' shots weren't high quality chances and the scoring chance numbers looked much closer. The same thing goes for the game against the Kings. Either way, Carolina went 2-1-0 this past week and owned 51% of the scoring chances...and only 43.6% of the shots. Like I said, it was a strange week but the Canes started February off on a strong note either way. Let's take a closer look at the past week for Carolina and single out some people.

For the last few years, the Southeast Division has been one dominated by the Washington Capitals with the rest of the teams fighting for wild card spots but things are very different this year. The Capitals haven't been their usual selves and the division appears to be up for grabs with the top three teams being separated by only five points and even the Hurricanes are only 10 points out at the bottom of the division.

The Southeast has been the weakest division in the NHL by far and it is looking like they will be producing only one playoff team this year. The question is which one will it be? The general consensus is that the Washington Capitals will get their acts together, get hot at the end of the year and take the division but the underlying numbers tell a completely different story. In fact, the underlying numbers for every team tell an interesting story and it isn't pretty for any of them. Only one team has a Fenwick close rate above 50%, every team has a negative goal differential and the clubs fighting for the division title would be bubble playoff teams at best if they weren't granted the automatic bid. The term "Southleast" has never been more true than it is this season. 

Find out what they say after the jump

An injury to Chad LaRose back on January 10th caused Kirk Muller to shake things up once again and he did so by placing everyone's favorite waiver claim Andreas Nodl on the third line with Brandon Sutter and Patrick Dwyer. This is the usual "defensive unit" for the Hurricanes that starts a lot of their shifts in their own zone and is matched up against other teams top lines. Nodl's specialty is defense so he seems like a natural fit on this line and ever since he has been placed on it, they have seen a fair amount of success.

In the 11 games they've played together, this line has been on ice for only two goals against, have a scoring chance percentage of 53.4% and are doing this while starting at least 64% of their draws in their own zone.That is extremely impressive for a line that gets this kind of workload. We know that Sutter and Dwyer have been doing this all and their success has been on-and-off, so is Nodl the secret behind this line or is he just riding a hot streak?

I don't think it is fair to say that Nodl is the complete reason for this line's success because he's been invisible on just about every other line and we've seen guys like LaRose and Tlusty play well with Sutter & Dwyer before. However, I do think that Nodl's defensive play is a big factor behind this line's success. Whenever you are on ice for 27 scoring chances against in 11 games, you are doing something right.

Every team needs a unit like this to be successful and it looks like the Canes are on the way to finding there's but the one thing that worries me is their lack of offense. Brandon Sutter is becoming a great two-way player but Dwyer and Nodl aren't exactly offensive stalwarts. Dwyer has nine points all season and Nodl has only five. I know Nodl has 22 with the Flyers last year but I'm willing to bet that most of it was due to playing with Mike Richards and James Van Riemsdyk. Sutter isn't Richards and Dwyer is obviously not JVR so Nodl's point total probably isn't getting over 15.

Either way, I can appreciate this line's great play in their own end for now since their success appears to be legit and not just luck-driven. Although, the PDO Crystal Ball isn't projecting good things for this line as all three members have PDO's above 1000 and it's due to high save percentages. I would keep a sharp eye on that because a small downturn could be just around the corner. The low amount of scoring chances they are giving up makes me confident in them for now, though.

Until tonight, the Hurricanes had not beaten the Los Angeles Kings since Feburary of 2007 and it looked like that streak would continue after the Canes looked flat in the first period and were trailing 1-0. It marks the third straight game that the team has gotten off to a sluggish start and this one was probably their worst yet, but it was all uphill after that...sort of. Carolina battled back and looked a lot stronger for the rest of the game which resulted in them taking home a 2-1 win.

It was definitely an ugly win and there were a lot of things that went wrong for the Canes (awful powerplay, only one even strength scoring chance in the first period, outshot yet again) but all of that usually gets minimized with a loss. Carolina has a lot of things to feel good about with this win, as well. Jiri Tlusty had one of his better games and scored a goal on what was a fantastic individual effort and the Hurricanes played a solid defensive game so Ward did not need to completely stand on his head for them to win.

Not the full-sixty minute effort that we always look for but a win against a good team and two points to get Carolina out of last place in the conference.

Scoring chances & more after the jump

The Hurricanes finished January with a record of 5-3-4 which is the first winning record they have had in a month this season. Definitely a huge milestone for a team that has struggled as much as the Canes have this year. Things do seem to be getting better under Kirk Muller, though. They are winning slightly more games, they earned points in over half of their games in January and if they don't win, they are at least competitive. The one thing that seemingly hasn't improved is the team's underlying numbers as they are stuck on a treadmill there. Their scoring chance percentage at even strength improved by only .01% from December to 47.4%, which is still pretty bad in the grand scheme of things. No one said that climbing out of the basement of the Eastern Conference would be easy.

Cam Ward was a big reason why the Canes earned 14 points in the standings in January as he had his best month of the season. Carolina was also outchanced in half of their games which is actually not bad compared to the rest of the season but still could use some improvement. Regardless of what the underlying numbers say, I have seen some improvements with this team and hopefully they can start to outshoot and outchance their opponents on a more regular basis because that is what is going to lead to more success. As of right now, Ward is dictating most of our success which is fine but not stable with how much goalie performance can vary. Most of the time, it's all about the 18 skaters in front of the goalie.

Let's see how those skaters have performed through scoring chances after four months of hockey.