Hurricanes feel they’ll bounce back again following Game 1 loss in Cup Final

RALEIGH, N.C. -- The puck went forehand, backhand, and slipped beneath the left pad of Vegas Golden Knights goalie Carter Hart. The celebration was immediate, on the ice, in the stands, a second goal by Nikolaj Ehlers in the first 12:08 of Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final making it seem like the Carolina Hurricanes might just keep rolling through yet another team on yet another night in these Stanley Cup Playoffs.

But the party did not last.

A mix of errors -- forced and unforced -- turned an early two-goal lead into a fight for every inch of ice, into the hardest game against the best team these Hurricanes have faced, into a 5-4 loss on a late, tiebreaking goal by Tomas Hertl with 3:24 left in regulation.

It turned the elation and celebration at Lenovo Center into a 1-0 deficit in the best-of-7 Final, into a vow to be better, into an even more acute understanding that they could be in for their first prolonged fight of the playoffs. 

“Guess that’s why there’s seven of these things,” defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere said. 

The defeat on Tuesday was only the second loss the Hurricanes have suffered in the playoffs after going 12-1 in the first three rounds to arrive at the Stanley Cup Final, a run that did not allow for many mistakes, for many disappointments, for much of anything other than wins. 

But the loss also marked a repeat of last round, an Eastern Conference Final in which the Hurricanes dropped the first game 6-2 to the Montreal Canadiens, a bad defeat that would spur them on to four straight wins to set up this date with the Golden Knights. 

“It’s one game,” Ehlers said. “Obviously, we would rather be up 1-0, but there are six games to go. We are fine with taking this to seven if we need to.”

They may be fine with taking this series to seven games. They may be fine with the back-and-forth with Vegas, with taking more hits than they have in the postseason. But they were not fine with their play, not fine with the way they handled the Vegas forecheck, not fine with their power play or their top line, which was as ghostlike as it has been at multiple points in the playoffs. 

“They had one good shift in the third there, but, yeah, they’ve got to -- I mean, everyone has to play well if you're going to win at this time of year,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said of the trio of Andrei Svechnikov, Sebastian Aho and Seth Jarvis. “It’s as simple as that. And your best guys have got to get on the score sheet. That’s going to have to happen if we want to get where we want to be.”

It had appeared that the top line was finding its way against the Canadiens in the conference final, scoring consecutive game-winners in Games 3 and 4, plus an empty-net goal at the end of Game 5. That came after the trio had not been on the ice at the same time for a 5-on-5 goal in the entirety of the first two rounds.

But the line’s play was not enough on Tuesday, not by a long shot, not against a team as good as the Golden Knights. 

Not that the three were alone. 

“It’s a battle and it’s going to be a grind,” said captain Jordan Staal, who scored to tie the game at 3-3 at 12:42 of the second period, a goal that came 16 years and 358 days since his last goal in the Stanley Cup Final, in Game 6 in 2009. “We’re expecting that. It’s a tough loss for sure, but we’ve got to get our game in better shape if we want to beat this team.”

They will have 48 hours to do so, 48 hours until they have a chance to tie the series, in Game 2 at Lenovo Center on Thursday (8 p.m. ET; ABC, SN, TVAS, CBC), in an effort to send the series to Las Vegas tied.

They know more than they did heading into the series, a series in which they had just three players with previous Stanley Cup Final experience and the Golden Knights had 13. They know what a fight the Golden Knights will put up, matching them goal for goal in a back-and-forth game that Gostisbehere tied 4-4 at 11:19 of the third period. 

A back-and-forth game that the Hurricanes almost took, had Hart not made a massive save on a Jarvis one-timer 21 seconds before the game-winner by Hertl. 

“We’ve got to get up to speed on how this game and this series is going to go,” Gostisbehere said. “I think we certainly got a taste of that now. And similarly, we made a lot of mistakes in that first game (against the Canadiens). It cost us. But you can't make ’em. You can’t make ’em.”

This Vegas team is better than that Montreal team, a group that was exhausted mentally and physically from going seven games in each of the first two rounds. This Vegas team is healthy and rested and experienced. 

That’s not a surprise.

As Jarvis said, “It's the Final. It should be the toughest test. It's the best team in the West.”

But the Hurricanes know what they need to do, what they need to correct. They know how good they can be when they’re at their best, with their own frustrating forecheck and stifling defense and confidence, the kind of confidence they had after Ehlers scored two and they were in the lead and that Stanley Cup glinted. 

"A ton of confidence in this group. ... We've bounced back before,” Jarvis said. “We felt like we were right there tonight. So just clean up a few things and move on from it."