We have a pretty good idea of how the Hurricanes and Canadiens want to play.
Coach Rod Brind’Amour’s Hurricanes are all about pressure. When they have the puck, they want to funnel it toward the net every chance they can to put the opposing goaltender and defense under duress. The Canes are always hunting rebounds, bounces and deflections. They are masters at taking advantage of broken plays.
The Canadiens are built differently. The Habs are teeming with talented playmakers and know that they don’t need to create tons of scoring chances to cash in.
With finishers like Cole Caufield, Juraj Slafkovsky and Ivan Demidov, plus playmakers like Nick Suzuki and Lane Hutson, Montreal can afford to be patient and try to punish on the counter.
Through two games of this best-of-seven series, both strategies have paid off. The Habs were able to catch Carolina on the rush time and again in Game 1, but the Hurricanes paid it back with a grinding effort in Game 2 to even the series.
The middle part of a Stanley Cup playoff clash is when we start to see adjustments, but this matchup already feels settled. Montreal could tinker with a few things since it has the benefit of the last change at home, but otherwise, these two teams have shown their cards.
That may not be good news for Carolina.
Though the Canes can be excused for a sloppy performance in the curtain-raiser after such a long layoff, they weren’t able to make it look easy with a much better effort in Game 2. Despite being outshot 26-12, the Canadiens hung around for the entire contest and dragged Carolina to overtime.
This is a familiar script for the Canes, who are 9-1 in the playoffs but have gone 4-for-4 in overtime and are 5-0 in games decided by one goal. Tight contests and winning on the margins are part of Carolina’s DNA, but it’s a dangerous way to go about your business when you get to this stage of the postseason. The pretenders have been weeded out.
Another red flag for the Hurricanes is that they still aren’t finding any easy offense. While Montreal has scored 35 goals over its past nine games (3.9 average), Carolina has scored 29 through 10 contests in the postseason and has only scored more than three goals twice — and one of those occasions was aided by a pair of empty-netters.
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The Achilles’ heel of Brind’Amour’s Hurricanes has been that they just can’t find the easy goal to break a game open in these tight-checking games late in the playoffs, and that skeleton still seems to be in the closet.
Carolina is terrific at what it does. The Hurricanes can swarm and smother you into submission. But if that doesn’t work, they don’t really have a Plan B.
We’ve already seen the Habs deal with a similar foe, the Lightning in Round 1, then defeat the Sabres in a defense-optional series in the second round. The Habs may not have the better Plan A, but they’ve got more outs than the Canes.
The Play: Montreal moneyline (+112, FanDuel)
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Michael Leboff is a long-suffering Islanders fan, but a long-profiting sports bettor with 10 years of experience in the gambling industry. He loves using game theory to help punters win bracket pools, find long shots, and learn how to beat the market in mainstream and niche sports.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: nypost.com
