No changes expected tonight: Rod Brind’Amour must avoid the Canadiens’ trap

Félix Forget
No changes expected tonight: Rod Brind’Amour must avoid the Canadiens’ trap
Credit: Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

Tonight, the Hurricanes have an important game ahead of them. Playing in front of their home crowd, they'll need to win to avoid heading to Montreal trailing 0-2 in the series.

The team didn't look good on Thursday night: they'll have to do better today.

So we were wondering if Rod Brind'Amour would try to shake things up tonight… but in the end, that wasn't the case: at the Hurricanes' practice today, there wasn't a single change to the team's lineup.

Aside from the national anthems, then, we expect the Canes to stick with exactly the same lineup. The team isn't panicking and has confidence in its group (which has had quite a bit of success this season)… but it will be interesting to see if this eventually backfires on Brind'Amour.

Because, as Arpon Basu pointed out in the Basu & Godin Notebook, some of the coach's comments suggest that the Hurricanes may be falling into the Habs' trap. Brind'Amour has emphasized that the Habs are the kind of team that, generally speaking, manages to win even when they're being dominated.

And even though that has indeed happened since the start of the playoffs, the majority of the team's wins haven't come that way.

Basu points out that in 2021, the Maple Leafs also adopted a similar mindset, telling themselves that their style was superior to the Habs', so all they had to do was stick to the same formula and they'd eventually come out on top. And we know how that story ended: the Canadiens found a way to win the series in seven games.

It makes sense that the Hurricanes aren't panicking yet and that they continue to trust a group that has had its share of success this season. After all, now that the rust has been shaken off, maybe the Canes will bounce back strong tonight and prove that their coach was right not to change a thing.

Except that the rust, even if Juraj Slafkovský acknowledges it may have had an impact in the first game, can't be an excuse forever. And if the Hurricanes continue to misread the Canadiens' style, they could be heading straight for a wall.


In a nutshell

– Erik Cole, who played for the Habs, will be at the Lenovo Center tonight.

– Jeff Gorton is giving Nick Suzuki some love.

– Hehe.

– Great read.

– The question remains.

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