Tweetmail No. 200: Two Hundred

Hello and welcome back to Tweetmail, 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 the 200th edition - enjoy the balloons and cake. (I wish there were balloons and cake.)

The sixth-place finish at the NHL Prospect Tournament in Traverse City was certainly disappointing, but only to a certain extent.
I always caveat expectations for this tournament with the fact that it's only four games and anything can happen. That's not to make advance excuses; it's just the truth about how quickly the team has to come together and the unpredictable nature of four games in five days.
Just because the Hurricanes didn't win the championship doesn't discount the talent that exists in their prospect pool.
The Athletic's Corey Pronman
ranked each farm system in the NHL, ranking the Hurricanes fourth and the St. Louis Blues third. In Traverse City, the Blues went winless in round-robin play before scoring a wild 8-4 win over the Rangers in the seventh-place game. That's how unpredictable this all is.
What matters way more than where the team finished is how the Hurricanes' top prospects performed in the tournament. Andrei Svechnikov scored two goals and assisted on two others to lead the team with four points. Martin Necas scored a goal and tallied an assist. Those two played well, and the chemistry is certainly building. Look no further than in the final game, when their line, along with Janne Kuokkanen, had probably their best 5-on-5 performance of the tournament, which resulted in the
game-tying goal in the first period
.
The line that played a full AHL season last year - Aleksi Saarela, Nicolas Roy and Julien Gauthier - wasn't bad, either. Gauthier had a pair of goals and was strong in front of the net on the power play. Saarela scored a goal on a quick shot and said he feels better physically after a full summer of training (compared to when he had shoulder surgery last summer). Roy's skating has improved, and he was responsible in the middle.
So, while it was a disappointing team result, I take away the positives of individual performances. At the end of the day, these four games can be used as a springboard for some of these players to get into the flow of game action before training camp opens on-ice Friday.

Cheers!
Let's take a gander at the Canes' 50-player
training camp roster
. If I'm reading this question correctly, this is basically setting aside Martin Necas and Andrei Svechnikov and focusing more in on the fringe players from a season ago or first-year professionals.
With those parameters in mind, I think Valentin Zykov has a good chance to begin the season in Raleigh. His performance with the big club at the end of the 2017-18 campaign - seven points (3g, 4a) in 10 games - was encouraging. Guys like Lucas Wallmark, Warren Foegele and Janne Kuokkanen, who all spent time with the Canes at one point or another last season, could all be in the mix to make the team out of camp, as well.
On defense, Trevor Carrick and Roland McKeown probably have the best shots of the non-first-year prospects to make the team out of camp, but even then, it's an uphill climb due to the Canes' depth at that position.
Speaking of …

Jaccob Slavin, Dougie Hamilton, Calvin de Haan, Brett Pesce, Trevor van Riemsdyk and Justin Faulk are all virtual locks to make the team out of camp. I'd also throw Hadyn Fleury into that mix as the seventh defenseman, given the 67 games he played with the Canes as a rookie in 2017-18.
That doesn't leave a lot of wiggle room for someone like Trevor Carrick or Roland McKeown, both of whom have logged NHL games, but that's what training camp is all about. Competition is going to steer the ship, and if Carrick and McKeown play well, that's only going to push everyone else to be better. Anyone - including them - could come in and snag a roster spot. There's also the unfortunate potential for injuries, so depth is a great problem to have.
Who wants it most? We'll find out.

Well played!
And, this actually is a great question. I started this series in February 2014 - over four years ago! - so apologies if my memory escapes some real gems from the first 199.
I've picked out a couple that stand out for one reason or another, and we'll go through them in chronological order.
The first was way back in
Tweetmail No. 12
, posed by

(who is now @KimMcGrealUK): What do you and the Canes staff do during the offseason? What brought this question to mind was how I answered it: with Spongebob GIFs. It's one of my crowning achievements on the World Wide Web.
The second was in
Tweetmail No. 116
, from

: If Jeff Skinner, Elias Lindholm, & Jordan Staal were emojis that are not emojis of their own faces, what emojis would they be? That was a fun, creative one to kick around. I enjoyed it.
Undoubtedly, there are so many more questions that I've enjoyed over the last four-plus years. Some have been educational - like how the team tests for concussions or information on the different types of padding and protection certain players wear - and others have been fun and amusing - like how it's determined who fetches the pucks out of the net during warm-ups or what road city has the best food (these are always my favorite).
I look forward to the batch of questions I receive each and every week, and I believe I've mentioned this before: I save every question I receive but don't answer, just in case I can circle around back to it in a later week. To date, that document has filled 60 pages in Microsoft Word. Keep 'em coming.
I've thoroughly enjoyed this series since it began, and I hope you all have as well. Here's to another 200!

As we all are closely monitoring the incoming Hurricane Florence, the team also explored alternative options for the first few days of training camp. With the small window of lead time and the size and scope of the storm, there wasn't a viable alternative location or plan, so camp will remain in Raleigh but practices on Friday, Saturday and Sunday will be closed to the public to ensure everyone's safety.
The latest projected path (as of Wednesday morning) might be more favorable for Raleigh than what was projected a few days ago, but it's still a large storm, and things can change at a moment's notice. Stay safe, everyone!
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Join me next week for more questions and more answers!
If you have a question you'd like answered or you just enjoy reading these features on a weekly basis, you can find me on Twitter at
@MSmithCanes
or drop an email
here
.