Tweetmail No. 122: Call-Ups, Challenges & Injuries
by Michael Smith @MSmithCanes / CarolinaHurricanes.com
Hello and welcome to a weekly feature on CarolinaHurricanes.com in which I take your Twitter questions about the Carolina Hurricanes or other assorted topics and answer them in mailbag form. Hopefully the final product is insightful to some degree, and maybe we have some fun along the way.
Let's get to it.
I wouldn't expect that in the near future. Even with Justin Faulk's injury and week-to-week status, the Hurricanes have seven defensemen on their roster. Of those seven, Ryan Murphy, Jakub Nakladal and Klas Dahlbeck haven't seen much action. Murphy was sick in training camp and then got injured in a preseason game, causing him to miss the team's first eight regular-season games. Nakladal and Dahlbeck each got early-season looks with Murphy out but have since not played much. Both drew back into the lineup on Tuesday night in New Jersey, and head coach Bill Peters had good things to say about each of their games.
"They both work real hard. I thought they did some good things here tonight," he said. "Dahlbeck got rewarded when he just put it on the net."
Dahlbeck scored his first goal with the Hurricanes and first since Oct. 25, 2015 in Toronto when his seeing-eye wrister from the point found the twine behind Cory Schneider.
"It feels great to be back in the lineup again," Dahlbeck said. "I really have to show that I can help this team win. Unfortunately we couldn't do that today. That's not great, but I think parts of this game were really good."
Before the Hurricanes look to Charlotte, they want to properly assess what they have in their room - and Peters is confident in that bunch at this point.
"Not right now. Not for me," Peters said earlier in the week when asked about potential call-ups. "I think we have the group that we need in the room, but the compete level of the group in the room has to be high enough to get the results we need on game night."
In order to initiate a coach's challenge, the team's timeout must be available because if the challenge is lost, the timeout is forfeited; there is no alternative consequence for losing a challenge.
A shrewd tactic is for a coach to use a challenge as his timeout, and here's why. A timeout in the NHL is 30 seconds long, but official reviews initiated by challenges tend to run longer. As a coach, if you were going to call a timeout anyway to attempt to stifle an opposing team's momentum or give your club a breather, you might as well at least look at either offside or goaltender interference, if applicable, to try to squeeze as much time out of the stoppage as you can.
Bryan Bickell didn't practice with the Hurricanes on Wednesday and hasn't been in the lineup since Sunday, Oct. 30 against Philadelphia. I asked Peters today if Bickell was healthy. He said that Bickell was "getting looked at" this morning but did not have definitive word on his status.
In other injury news, defenseman Justin Faulk is week-to-week with an upper-body injury. Peters has ruled him out for the rest of this week (Thursday vs. Anaheim and Saturday vs. Washington) and said a further update on his timeframe could be available on Monday.
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