It was hard to see the big picture when the first loss was so fresh.
The Carolina Hurricanes will go into their game Tuesday against Tampa Bay with a 9-1-0 record, with the Metropolitan Division lead. There will be few smiles about it and still the sour taste of defeat, but the Canes at some level realize the start to their season has been a good one, a very strong one.
Losing to the Florida Panthers on Saturday stung. Giving up three power-play goals in the first period stung. Seeing goalie Antti Raanta injured and leave the game stung.
In the end, it was a 5-2 loss, Carolina's first of the season. It was a tough night.
But it comes after nine wins.
"Yeah, 9-1 is a great start," defenseman Jaccob Slavin said after the game. "It's definitely a good start and gets us going in the right direction.
"Our identity as a team has been a super hard-working team, consistently, but it wasn't the start we needed tonight. Some of that comes ... not being prepared to get going right away."
In Rod Brind'Amour's first three years as head coach, the Canes went 6-3-1, 6-3-1 and 7-3-0 in the first 10 games of the season. All three ended with the Canes in the Stanley Cup playoffs, albeit in unusual times because of the pandemic.
The Canes were undone Saturday by four penalties in the first period that the Panthers converted into the three-power play scores in taking a 4-0 lead. The Panthers, a quick team, outskated and outhustled the Canes in the first and found the openings to beat goalie Frederik Andersen, whose 8-0 start to the season made him the NHL's third star of the month for October.
Brind'Amour disagreed when asked if the Canes were "sluggish" in the opening period, even as they appeared a step slow and caught out of position.
"I don't think we were sluggish," he said. "I just think our penalty kill wasn't very good. That's the game. We started the first shift on the penalty kill, then the second penalty, and before you know it we had three or four in the first period. That's the game right there."
The Canes had the puck a lot in the final two periods and outchanced the Panthers as Brind'Amour shuffled lines and defensive pairs. He moved Andrei Svechnikov to Sebastian Aho's line and rookie Seth Jarvis to Jordan Staal's line. He paired defenseman Ethan Bear with Brady Skjei and Tony DeAngelo with Slavin as the Canes tried to work around the injury to Brett Pesce that kept him out of the game.
In the second, Jesper Fast scored off a Slavin pass. Then came an incident reminiscent of the scary incident in Toronto in 2020, when Canes goalie Petr Mrazek skated out into the circle to play a puck and was leveled by the Maple Leafs' Kyle Clifford. That came after starter James Reimer also had been injured.
Raanta, who relieved Andersen after the first period, took a big hit from Ryan Lomberg, who appeared to try and avoid Raanta at the last second but crashed into him. Lomberg was assessed a five-minute charging major and game misconduct as Panthers fans booed — some sympathy for Raanta, perhaps, but loudly disagreeing with the call.
In the February 2020 game, David Ayres was the emergency backup goalie in Toronto and became an instant hero playing and helping the Canes win. The emergency goalie wasn't needed Saturday at FLA Live Arena as Andersen re-entered the game, stayed in and stopped the last 12 shots he faced, with some high-quality saves.
"He played great, he was good all night," Brind'Amour said of Andersen. "We took him out after the first because we were dead in the water. We didn't want to leave him in there. Unfortunately, Raanta got hurt so we had to throw him back in and he gave us a chance to come back."
Brind'Amour said Sunday that Raanta had been sent back to Raleigh for further evaluation and that goalie Alex Lyon would be recalled from the Chicago Wolves of the AHL.
The five minutes of power-play time after Raanta's injury resulted in a goal by Vincent Trocheck, and the Canes had other chances in the third against Florida goalie Spencer Knight. They pulled Andersen for an extra attacker in the final three minutes of regulation, only to have Anthony Duclair score an empty-net goal to finish out a two-goal, two-assist night for the Panthers (10-0-1), who were playing without captain Aleksander Barkov.
How good is this Hurricanes team? Given the Canes' schedule in November and December, they will have a good read by Christmas — 15 of the next 23 games are on the road.
The game at Florida left everyone disappointed, and they didn't try to disguise it. Which was fine with Brind'Amour.
"Guys know how to self-evaluate after a game," he said. "You can't have five guys come to play. We need everyone ready to play."
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