It would be easy to look at the Carolina Hurricanes’ results so far this season and wonder what’s going on with the perennial contender.
Sure, Carolina’s 3-1-0 record seems reasonable enough, but a team known for playing tight, structured, hockey scoring 19 goals and giving up 17 — both NHL highs — in four games is tough to fathom. Those totals do not gel with the general consensus around who the Hurricanes are, and could easily drive a belief that something bizarre is going on with this group.
That’s true to an extent, but only on the most basic level.
It’s more accurate to say the Hurricanes are almost precisely who they were last season when they ranked 15th in the NHL in goals scored (3.20/game) and second in the league in goal suppression (2.56/game).
We can see that in both the team’s possession metrics and basic shot numbers.
Carolina has been a little less strong than last year on metrics concerned with the quality of opportunities, like expected goal percentage and scoring chance percentage, but the team is basically playing the same kind of hockey. The Hurricanes still dominate the puck and limit opponents’ opportunities on net.
That figures considering the team has the same head coach, while each of its top-nine forwards and top-four defenseman played at least 68 games with the team last year — with the exception of free-agent acquisition Michael Bunting. Carolina’s 2022-23 goaltending tandem of Frederik Andersen and Antti Raanta is also back in the fold after both tested the free-agent market.
All of that means that Carolina is a team comprised of the same skaters and goaltenders as last year, helmed by the same bench boss with the same philosophy — and at the most fundamental level they are playing the same style. Yet the goal totals in Hurricanes’ game so far make them look like a chaotic run-and-gun outfit.
Unsurprisingly, the underlying cause of these unusual outcomes appears to be shooting luck. The Hurricanes are scoring on 13.8% of their attempts on target, while their opponents are finding the twine on 16.8% of attempts.
Neither number will stay nearly that high as the season continues.
It’s not a massive revelation to conclude that the Hurricanes defense is likely to tighten up in the weeks to come while its offense cools off, especially if Sebastian Aho misses more time with an upper-body injury.
That said, the Hurricanes do provide a neat reminder of why it’s important not to overreact to what we see in the early chapters of NHL seasons.
What we see in a handful of games at the beginning of the season can sometimes be important over the longer term — like the New Jersey Devils announcing their arrival as a team to be feared with a 13-game winning streak early in 2022-23 — but it’s often just noise.
It’s rarely fun to consider how much we don’t know, but much of what will matter in the 2023-24 season has yet to reveal itself to us. The Vegas Golden Knights might be a juggernaut, or they might just be hot out of the gate. A winless Seattle Kraken team with three goals in four games could be in for some serious regression from last year’s playoff run, or we could be watching the worst moment of its season right now.
None of that means that makes the NHL any less worth watching early in the year. If anything, the rampant uncertainty makes for quality TV. It’s just clear that not everything we’re looking at is really as it seems. If it were, then the Hurricanes would’ve just made one of the most radical stylistic shifts in recent memory.
