After winning five straight games to begin the season, the Canes have now lost three of their last four games. Two weeks into the season, it's by no means panic time, but the team knows it needs more from everyone.
"We'll have to sit on this one for a little while, which is unfortunate, but I think the boys will hopefully learn a lesson from that one and this trip and how it's just not easy," Staal said. "We're showing up thinking it's going to be easy, and it's not. It's a good league, and they played well."
"We didn't generate anything. We gave them a couple easy ones, it felt like, at the start, and we just never got going," Brind'Amour said. "You want to make the other team earn it, and we didn't make it hard enough."
2. Anaheim Builds a Lead
The Hurricanes gifted the Ducks their first goal of the game in the first five minutes with a defensive breakdown, as four players got sucked over to the near side of the rink while Adam Henrique had plenty of room to skate and snipe a shot past Petr Mrazek. Then, after the Canes failed to convert on the first power play of the game, Troy Terry doubled his team's lead with a redirection of Cam Fowler's point shot.
"That was a tough one. It was kind of the whole game," Staal said. "We weren't ready to go and it showed."
In the second period, Jakob Silfverberg stuffed in his own rebound and then Carter Rowney scored a shorthanded goal to stretch the Ducks' lead to 4-0. That prompted Brind'Amour to make his first mid-game goaltending change as head coach.
"I hate doing that. It's not [Mrazek's] fault. We left him out to dry. We had a lot of guys sleeping tonight," he said. "I didn't need to see him in there getting hung out to dry like that, so that was more just a statement than anything."
Though the Canes cut the deficit in half later in the period, they couldn't spark another push in the third period.
"It just felt like a pretty vanilla game. We gave them that early one for no reason. I don't think they had four chances in the first, and they scored on two of them. We just gave it to them, I felt like, and then they played a good game," Brind'Amour said. "They just didn't give us much. When you get a lead, that's how you play. They did a nice job."
3. You Never Forget Your First
Haydn Fleury had waited a long time for this one.
In his 96th NHL game, Fleury finally found the back of the net for his first career NHL goal. And what a play it was to make it happen. Derek Grant, who was feeling pressure from Lucas Wallmark, made an ill-advised, weak backhand clear, and Fleury jumped across the blue line to keep the zone on his backhand. He settled the puck, took a step and fired a slap shot from the top of the left circle that beat Ryan Miller.