Neither the Hurricanes or the fans got the results they wanted last night. Those who got their hopes up for a win were let down and those who wanted see the team continue to "tank" also came away disappointed because the Hurricanes earned a point in the standings from the overtime loss. Kirk Muller and the team felt differently, though. In his post-game conference, Muller was very happy about the resiliency this team showed last night and how they battled back from a two-goal deficit to force overtime. The Hurricanes have been itching to find something positive to hang onto since the season is now officially lost and I guess last night's comeback is something for them to feel good about even if they didn't win. Managing to do it without Jeff Skinner in the lineup was impressive and if anything, it's a sign that the team hasn't given up despite there being no hope in this season. 

For the past month or so, the Canes have had to dig themselves out of bad situations that they put themselves into and last night was no different. The difference between last night's game and the rest of the season was that they actually managed to come back and force overtime, which was encouraging but the Canes need to do something to prevent themselves from even getting into these situations in the first place. I know the team is playing shorthanded now, but these mistakes were happening even with Skinner & Pitkanen in the lineup. Last night, it was a bad first period and penalties that got the Canes into early trouble and while they managed to battle back, they still had a lot of ugly moments. Not that it matters at this point of the season, but the team is still playing for pride so I'm sure we'll see more strong efforts the rest of the way.

As much as I hate to say it, the Hurricanes statistical performance is kind of an afterthought at this point of the season. I think we all know by now that this team is better than their record indicates, but they are still out of the playoff hunt and are basically playing for next year. Whether or not they outchance an opponent or earn the best of the territorial play seems kind of irrelevant when all a win or loss does is affect where they will end up in the draft. The numbers would even out in an 82-game season but not when you are down to seven games with a beaten up roster. Thus, the stats are probably the last thing on everyone's mind right now and that's especially true regarding last night's 3-2 loss to the Senators.

This was basically a typical 2013 Hurricanes game where they had a slight territorial edge and didn't play a poor road game, but they had a few defensive mistakes that ended up in their own net which cost them. That along with a lack of finishing ability is what doomed them tonight, which has been the ongoing story for the last year. I think we are all programmed to expect a loss at this point, so the final score isn't a big deal. What has more fans despondent is that the Canes young star Jeff Skinner was knocked out of the game after taking a hit to the head from Senators defenseman Jared Cowen in the first period. In a lost season, the last thing you want to happen is for your best players to get hurt and that's what happened tonight. It's even worse in the case of Skinner because this could be his third head injury in the span of a three year career. I'm sure most would agree that his health is more important than the result of tonight's game, so here is to hoping that he is okay. 

When an injury on a borderline hit occurs, you would expect the play of the victim's team to drop off. The Hurricanes had other things in mind. The Senators were able to get two unanswered goals on Carolina after Skinner left the game, but I didn't notice much of a sag in Carolina's play after that incident. In fact, they were a little more fired up and seemed to be more interested in physically punishing the Senators and making them pay for injuring one of their best players. Not counting Chad LaRose's retaliation scrap, the Hurricanes instigated four fights tonight (one of which involved the intimidating Marc-Andre Bergeron) and started plenty of other scrums between plays in an attempt to avenge their fallen teammate. This isn't to say that they were more interested in fighting than winning the game, because Carolina made a good comeback attempt but you could tell that Skinner's injury changed some of their intentions tonight, and understandably so.

This was a good display of "team toughness" and comradery, but it hasn't been proven that this kind of stuff can win you games. At the end of the day, Skinner is still injured and the Hurricanes took yet another loss and there isn't anything that can be changed about that now.

After Thursday night's game where the Hurricanes outplayed the Capitals only to end up taking a 3-1 loss, many got the feeling that this team was due for a few bounces. That's probably fair to say because they had lost 14 of their last 15 heading into this game, but the Hurricanes were also playing to well to continue this losing streak. They had a lot of games where they put forth a good effort and had it derailed by terrible goaltending, mental mistakes or not being able to score no matter how many chances they produced. No one has questioned their efforts from the past week, but the team's execution and mental toughness has been put to the test plenty of times and they didn't respond well.

This all changed last night, as the Canes were able to get their first win at home in over a month. Their performance wasn't much better or worse from what it has been over the last week, but what changed for them was that they had a few more bounces go their way. That isn't to say the Hurricanes won based on luck alone because they outplayed Boston for a good portion of this game, but sometimes you need a few bounces to go your way even when your team plays well and the Canes finally got that. They got a great performance in goal from Justin Peters, a bit of a fluky goal from Jeff Skinner to tie the game in the first period and a couple of well-timed misses on what would have been scoring chances for the Bruins.

After how far the Hurricanes PDO had fallen in recent weeks, the Hockey Gods were eventually going to reward them for their strong play, so it was nice to see that happen last night. We have seen plenty of times this year how big of a role good goaltending and special teams can play in winning and losing. The Canes have normally been on the wrong end of this battle, but last night was a different story and quite frankily, it was nice to see.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This might sound terrible since the Hurricanes are battling for a playoff spot right now, but their game against the Canadiens last night was one I did not expect them to win. Montreal has been one of the best teams in the NHL this season and has been very tough to beat at home on top of that while the Hurricanes recently ended a seven game losing skid. The Hurricanes showed some improvement in the game against Winnipeg, but Montreal is at a different level than the Jets, so the most I was hoping for was for the Canes to get at least a point or show some improvement from the last two weeks.

Considering they lost 4-1 and were outchanced 18-13 (15-10), neither of those things happened but after watching the game, I didn't feel that the Hurricanes played as poorly as the final score indicates. They simply lost and were outplayed by a better team and you know what? That happens a lot. I'm not exactly sure what it says about the Hurricanes playoff chances, but I think it does show that they aren't good enough to be competitive with the other top teams in the Eastern Conference like the Canadiens. They won't have to play the Canadiens for the rest of the season, but they do have a a few more games against top Eastern Conference teams remaining, which could prove to be a very tough test if last night's game is any indication.

With that being said, I did not think the Hurricanes were awful last night despite putting up only 19 shots on goal and losing 4-1. In terms of territorial play, things were relatively even, but the Hurricanes weak powerplay and inability to hit the net (39 total missed & blocked shots) came back to haunt them again, resulting in them being on the losing end of the scoring chance battle for the ninth game in a row.