Carolina Hurricanes: What have we learned from pre-season
By Conor Power
Carolina concluded their exhibition games with a 4-3 loss to the Nashville Predators during a matinee on Saturday. With that, we saw the Carolina Hurricanes flex their muscles in terms of prospects and how they’re developing as well as the new faces the team’s success has attracted via free agency. There’s been a lot of good from this preseason.
It looks like the head coach of the Carolina Hurricanes, Rod Brind’amour, has got all the new guys buying into his system in order to extract the most out of each player. Players are diving into block shots during preseason games which really goes to show just how well Rod Brind’amour sells his system to the new guys that come into the dressing room and need to buy into the system.
More than old guys buying in, young faces have come into the big picture this pre-season. The one that stands out perhaps more than the rest of the prospects is 19-year-old winger Seth Jarvis. With Jarvis’ emergence as a problematic player for NHL players in preseason, he’s earned high praise from every corner of the organization and could make the team out of camp at just 19.
Now, there have also been some setbacks. One major example is the injury suffered by Carolina’s 2nd line center Vincent Trocheck. Trocheck suffered a leg injury in practice and missed the final week of the preseason. It has been reported Trocheck has been assigned to the injured reserve, but that is yet to be confirmed by the organization as I am writing this. This source is CapFriendly, or as a friend of mine likes to call it, the motherboard.
Losing Trocheck hurts, although he was skating today with the hockey club. Anyhow, there’s been a lot more good to take from this post-season than bad, so let us dive into the pros, cons, and all the other things we can take away from this preseason as we head to the start of the NHL 2021-22 NHL Regular season.