Carolina Hurricanes: Goalie issues mask the real problem

The continued hand-wringing in Canes Nation regarding the revolving door in net masks the team’s biggest problem – offense. The Carolina Hurricanes’ inability to score goals will doom the team to its 10th straight season without a playoff appearance.

This is nothing new for Carolina Hurricanes fans. Only once in the past decade have the Canes scored more goals than the league average (231 in 2011, two more than the average). Carolina has not finished a regular season with more goals scored than allowed since 2008-09, when they compiled a +15 rating and advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals. Since then they have had nine straight seasons with a negative goal differential and nine straight seasons with no appearance in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

The postseason skein and lack of offense are not coincidental. In the five seasons since the NHL switched to two divisions from three, only three teams (Detroit in 2014 and 2016, and Ottawa in 2017) advanced to the playoffs despite a negative goal differential. That’s just 3.75% of playoff teams.

The team’s ongoing offensive struggles made the off-season move to trade away left winger Jeff Skinner all the more head-scratching. A gifted goal scorer, Skinner sometimes struggled under former Canes Coach Bill Peters’ tight-checking style that emphasized defense and puck possession. During Peters’ four seasons, the Canes were -36, -25, -18 and -28 in goal differential.

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Given more offensive freedom in Buffalo, Skinner has scored 21 goals in his first 31 games. He’s on a pace to surpass 50 goals (his career high is 37) and has lifted a team that finished last in 2018 into the third-best record in the Eastern Conference through Dec. 11. Buffalo appears set to end its seven-year playoff drought because it understood the way to fix a struggling offense (last in goals scored in 2018) was to add a goal scorer.

While Skinner and the Sabres are enjoying a breakout season, the Hurricanes find themselves in familiar territory – on the playoff bubble with a negative (-9) goal differential and last in the Eastern Conference in goals scored. To make the postseason for the first time in a decade, the Canes are going to have to start scoring more goals, regardless of who is in net.

The good news is that the Carolina Hurricanes appear to have a few players who could develop into legitimate 30-goal scorers. Sebastian Aho scored 24 and 29 goals in his first two seasons, and he’s still only 21 years old. Andrei Svechnikov is on a pace to come close to matching Aho’s rookie season, with six goals and seven assists in the team’s first 29 games, and he is a teenager. Warren Foegele has struggled to find his niche, but he was a prolific scorer in the minors, and he is only 22.

Big things are still expected from Martin Necas, the Canes’ top pick in 2017 who doesn’t turn 20 until January, and Janne Kuokkanen, another exciting Finnish product who leads the Charlotte Checkers with 27 points and 11 goals through Dec. 11 and who has just been called up to the team to fill in for Micheal Ferland, who remains the team’s leading goal scorer despite missing several games recently due to his concussion.

The Carolina Hurricanes have scoring in the system – it’s time they used it.