In the third year of the Carolina Hurricanes’ rebuild, some are starting to question whether Ron Francis has the team on the right path
After the Carolina Hurricanes’ push towards the playoffs last season, fans expected serious improvement this year. Nobody expected a cup contender, but whispers of playoffs spread among the team’s followers on message boards and the Twitterverse. Even a few members of the press predicted the Canes squeaking into the last playoff spot in the Eastern conference. But with a record of 3-4-3 to start the season, a seven-year playoff drought turning to eight seems almost inevitable. Some fans are losing faith in the team and already declaring the rebuild a failure. Many just shake their head and ask, “Where did it all go wrong?”
A Losing Culture
It’s been seven years. Seven long fruitless years without playoff hockey in Raleigh, NC. 2009 was the last time the Hurricanes played hockey past the first week in April. With each passing year since that last playoff berth, nothing seemed to get better no matter the changes made to the franchise. For every step forward there was one step back. The last seven years spent in limbo between very bad and very good and reaping the rewards of neither.
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No increased revenue and fan base from playoff games. No top three draft picks from being the worst. Each season’s reward was a string of middling draft picks (Zach Boychuk, Zac Dalpe, Phillipe Paradis, and maybe Ryan Murphy) mixed with low attendance to create a malaise over Hurricane fandom. Long gone were the heady days of the 2006 Stanley Cup run. Even the 2009 Eastern Conference finals appearance seemed far in the past. Those successes replaced with mediocre ninth through twelfth finishes repeated ad nauseam; each season a play filled with different lines, stories, and actors yet the end always remained the same.
A Rebuild Process
It was in this atmosphere, Ron Francis took over the GM position in 2014. An atmosphere he knew all too well seeing as how he had been with the team in a management role since 2011. Yet even with Francis taking over the reigns from Jim Rutherford, the losses still continued to pile up. Even in a rebuild shouldn’t there be some sort of progress? Right now the team is one point behind where they were at this point last year, and things are not looking like they’ll get better any time soon.
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It’s not like Francis hasn’t done all the right things. He shed salary by getting rid of Eric Staal and buying out Alexander Semin and James Wisniewski. Francis also hoarded draft picks for the last three NHL drafts by trading veterans at the deadline. Under Francis’s oversight, the Carolina Hurricanes acquired 18 picks in the last two years with three of them being in the first round alone. Those numbers don’t even include the extra two picks the Hurricanes have in the 2017 draft as well. When it comes to rebuilding, the Hurricanes under Ron Francis have checked off all the boxes. So why isn’t the team progressing like it should? What has gone wrong with the Francis rebuild?
The answer is simple. Not. A. Single. Thing. Progress is there if one looks a little harder. Maybe not in the wins columns, but definitive progress is being made with the way the team plays hockey and the systems being put in place. Just take a look at some of the metrics of past Hurricanes’ seasons.
It’s plain as day that the Carolina Hurricanes are improving. They are getting more chances against their opponent, while at the same time limiting their opponent to less. Hockey, like poker, is a game of skill with a lot of luck thrown in. Francis and Bill Peters are improving the team’s odds each season and It’s only a matter of time before this starts translating into wins.
Compared to the Best
Fans and hockey writers often point to teams such as the L. A. Kings, Tampa Bay Lightning, Pittsburgh Penguins, and Chicago Blackhawks as the way to build winners. No denying those are teams that created the model. Most people often forget, though, the actual amount of time spent losing before those teams started to succeed at their current levels. The Blackhawks didn’t make the playoffs five years in a row before starting their streak in 2009 season. Tampa Bay didn’t make the playoffs five of the last six seasons before starting their streak in 2014. L. A. Kings also missed the playoffs six years in a row and the Penguins missed for four.
It feels worse here in Carolina because the team has lost for so long, but if actually measured by years since the team actually started rebuilding the Hurricanes are on schedule. Compare the Hurricanes stats so far this year with those other teams. The stats are from each team the year before they made the playoffs and compared with the Hurricanes stats this season to date. The Kings season would be the 2009 season, Blackhawks, 2008, and 2010 for Tampa Bay. Again all stats sourced from Corsica and adjusted for score and venue.
The graph shows that the Hurricanes are either comparable with those teams or better. Ahead of the game, when things are finally ready the Carolina Hurricanes will be a force to be reckoned with.
As a Cane’s fan, it’s hard being patient after so many losing years. Even if one trusts the process it will always be more fun to watch the team win than lose. But change, like winter, is coming. The taste is in the air like rain before the storm. Trust Pope Francis and the Carolina Church of Hockey to end our stay in hockey purgatory and deliver us to playoff paradise. So it is written, so shall it be.