RALEIGH, N.C. — Seconds after saying he wasn’t much of a thinker, Brad Marchand waxed poetic on what it takes to rise above pressure and come through in the clutch, to crave opportunity and seize it once it presents itself.
He conjured up 424 words on the subject — the Stanley Cup champion and Olympic gold medallist’s thesis on how to be a winner.
“I think the thing that I’ve found as I’ve gone on is that pressure is made up, it’s a lot of noise,” Marchand started.
Had the Carolina Hurricanes listened to everything else he had to say about it, they might have looked a little different than they did in Game 2 of this series.
Instead, they looked even worse than they did in dropping Game 1, losing 5-0 and getting booed off the ice by the few fans that remained at Lenovo Center when the final buzzer sounded.
The Hurricanes were disconnected from the start of Thursday’s game, they were incapable of establishing the forecheck that’s been so foundational to their success, they couldn’t muster enough shots, they were dispirited before 16 minutes had even gone by, and they were so apparently suffocated by the pressure of the moment.
How else do you explain the way they habitually turned gold to lead in this one?
A sample: Jordan Staal breaking through the middle of the ice, clearing the Panthers defenders out of the way and dropping the puck to Jordan Martinook in the guts of the slot, only to have Martinook turn the best scoring chance of the night into a routine save for Sergei Bobrovsky.
That was right before Sam Bennett tipped Carter Verhaeghe’s shot to make it 3-0 Panthers 15:50 into the game.
It was Florida’s fifth shot on net.
Gustav Forsling scored on their first, Matthew Tkachuk scored on their third because those guys are comfortable under pressure.
They made the rest of this game feel like a funeral for the Hurricanes.
It was Carolina’s 14th straight loss in the Eastern Conference Final, dating back to 2009. Their sixth straight to the Panthers in Round 3, dating back to 2023. And Marchand’s words from earlier in the day resonated with every passing second of it.
“Pressure is something you can embrace, or it’s something you can be nervous about,” said Marchand. “What I’ve found the more I’ve gone on, and even early on, is when you’ve worked your whole life to be put in a position to have success or to achieve something that you only ever dreamed of potentially becoming a reality in winning the Cup, that’s gotta excite you to want to be a difference maker and want to be a hero. And when you get that opportunity to make a difference, it’s not to get nervous under pressure of what happens if you win or if you lose. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter if you win, or you lose, there’s only one team that wins. The pressure, if you let it get to you, it can affect you. But if you’re excited about it, and you want to be the hero, you want to score the big goal and make the big play, and you get excited and want to embrace that, then that’s when I feel like the pressure just kind of slides off and it’s not something you think about.”
Ahead of this game, the stakes were higher than they’ve been for either team this season. And yet, it never felt that way for Marchand’s Panthers.
That’s the value of championship experience.
When we asked Tkachuk if he still gets nervous before these games, the 2024 champ said, “Not really anymore.”
“I think the most nervous I’d ever been was before Game 4 of the finals last year, in Edmonton,” Tkachuk added. “But ever since then, not really a whole lot. But that’s just because you know how you’re going to play. If we didn’t how we were going to play out there and prepare…
“We’re prepared. We know how we’re going to play. We know each line’s going to go out there, and we try to roll over them, and sometimes it doesn’t work out perfectly. But when you know your game, you shouldn’t be too nervous about it. You get beat. (There are) games you get beat… We lost a bunch last year and it’s not always been perfect all the time. But you just continue to do the right things. And it’s natural to be a little bit nervous. But when you have a great plan and you have a great work ethic, like our team does, it shouldn’t be as bad.”
For the Hurricanes, who’ve been chasing championship experience throughout this decade, it looked terrible.
You could feel the tension on their bench from the press box, and it obviously paralyzed them on the ice.
“I think we came out with the right intentions, but it was trying to do too much,” said coach Rod Brind’Amour. “And then we’re not doing the things that we do as a team that normally helps us. We were just — I didn’t know what I was watching in the first period, and that didn’t go well. I said the other day, the margin here is tight. We’re not going to beat this team if we’re not on the same page. And tonight, for whatever reason — like I said, the intentions were good, everyone’s trying, ‘OK, I’m gonna do this’ — but that’s not how we do it, and it just backfired.”
By the end of it, the Hurricanes were nursing more than just bruised egos.
After getting rocked by A.J. Greer in the second minute of the second period, defenceman Sean Walker played five more shifts and didn’t return. Seth Jarvis, who got popped by Niko Mikkola, missed the last 9:20 of the game.
Brind’Amour didn’t have an update on either one of them.
He also didn’t know how the Hurricanes would recover from this loss, with the series shifting to Florida and the Panthers appearing unbeatable.
“We gotta just, not throw this game away, but we gotta learn from it — what doesn’t work — and give yourself a chance,” Brind’Amour said. “That’s what we didn’t do. I thought we did the other night. Obviously, same result. But clearly, you go off the script and it’s not going to go well. So that’s the lesson learned there.”
But can the Hurricanes learn to rise above the pressure? The evidence they don’t know how keeps mounting.
They talked about bearing down on their chances after creating several high-quality ones in Game 1, but they passed all of them up in Game 2.
Literally.
There was Jarvis, flying down his off-wing on a late second-period two-on-one, forcing a pass instead of shooting before Jackson Blake followed his lead and passed to the Panthers instead of shooting from four feet in front of Bobrovsky.
Hurricanes fans, who are accustomed to seeing their team shoot even when they shouldn’t, started chanting “shoot the puck.”
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Bennett listened and scored his second of the game to make it 4-0 in the 40th minute of play.
The Hurricanes kept trying to search for the perfect play thereafter, with none of them apparently wanting to be the difference maker, or the hero.
As Marchand said on Thursday morning, “You’re not going to win playoff hockey with that.”
“When you prepare the right way and you practise the right things, those things show up in the playoffs,” he concluded. “And that’s what the players that I’ve played with and that I’ve learned from (do). I’m fortunate enough to follow in their footsteps and learn those things so that when you get into those so-called high-pressure situations, you just do what you’re used to doing, and usually the little, simple things are what comes up in those moments.”
There’s been nothing simple about how the Hurricanes have handled these moments. Nothing in recent years, nothing in recent days, and if that doesn’t change, their losing streak in the Conference Final will continue.
