Cam and Eric, Awesome Show, Great Job

Where the hell have these Hurricanes been all season?


In the four games since he was named Captain, Eric Staal has seven goals and is a +2. True, he has no assists in that span, but the most important number is that the 'Canes are 3-1-0 in that span. Tonight at Madison Square Garden, Staal and co. trounced the Rangers 5-1, two of those goals coming from Staal himself. Cam Ward too was pretty stellar, stopping 37 of 38 shots just a few days after breaking Arturs Irbe's franchise win record of 130. Even the oft-maligned Sergei Samsonov popped two goals tonight in the Big Apple. So again I'll ask: What the hell?

I'm pleased as a fan that the 'Canes are winning games. It's fun to watch your team win. But after such a horrendous start to the '09-10 season, it had seemed that GM Jim Rutherford had declared it a lost cause and that a rebuild was beginning. Having gone on record saying that "you don't want to win too many games" at a certain point in order to ensure a high draft pick, this sudden burst of 5-goal games has got to have him scratching his head. Was Brind'Amour's captaincy really such an elephant in the room that as soon as it was removed the team that we all expected at the start of the year suddenly showed up? Staal now has 40 points in 39 games. I feel that I must eat crow on my post a few days ago about his production. This may be an aberration, but I'm reminded of two years ago when Brind'Amour hurt his knee at around the midway point of the season. Whitney, Williams and Cole were also out for big stretches of time with injuries that year, and Staal put the mostly AHL journeyman team on his back and almost willed them into the playoffs. The win tonight puts the 'Canes 14 points out of 8th in the East, with 30 games left to play. However, to even sniff 90 points on the year, a generous cutoff, they'd have to go something like 23-4-3 (for 49 points). That seems pretty unlikely. So the question is: play for the eighth seed, or play for the high draft pick? It would seem that shoring up the future would be the most prudent, but when the team is capable of dominating games as this (admittedly short) stretch has shown they are... where do we go from here?

Mindless Rambling

Am I the only one who thinks that those Brinks/Broadview security ads are kind of sexist? Watch out, upwardly mobile young women! Psycho ex-boyfriends and/or potential thieves are around every corner; your weak feminine frame will be unable to stop the inevitable onslaught of deranged males. Buy our security system to protect your ridiculously ornate, heavily candle-decorated house... because all the unmarried women I know have tons of money and need to protect it.

O Captain, My Captain

It was announced yesterday that, effective immediately, the captaincy of the Carolina Hurricanes would transfer from Rod Brind'Amour, he of the insane workout regimen, meandering nasal bone and owner of the NHL's worst +/- for two years running, to Thunder Bay wunderkind and multimillionaire Eric Staal. It's been a roller coaster of highs and lows for Brind'Amour over the last few years; he won his (and Carolina's) first Stanley Cup in 2006 and two consecutive Selke awards the following seasons before going on to tear his ACL and slip slowly into punchline territory as his production and icetime began to shrivel and diminish like George Costanza in a cold pool.


















Staal, too, has seen ups and downs since his 100-point, Cup-winning sophomore campaign in '06. He's never again reached triple digit points (the closest he came was in '07-'08 with 82, averaging exactly one point per game as the Hurricanes were knocked from a playoff spot by Washington on the very last day of the regular season) and in '08-'09 was actually second in team scoring to Ray Whitney. On the other side of that coin, he did pop 15 points in 18 playoff games that season as the Hurricanes rocketed from bubble team to Eastern Conference finalists. His franchise-record consecutive start streak came to an end this year after starting in every game but one of his first five NHL years, and goes into tonight's game second in team scoring, again to Ray Whitney, with 33 points in 36 games (though to be fair, Whitney only has one more point in ten more games played). Staal's tendency to be dominant against crappy teams only to disappear against powerhouse teams has been well documented and discussed all over the internet; here is a good example, and here is a rebuttal to it. Scroll down this very blog, and you'll see an example of an angry 'Canes fan bitching about Staal's performance this season and its inconsistency with the amount of money he's getting paid.

Right this second though, that's neither here nor there. The Hurricanes organization has made the decision that, moving forward, the basement-dwelling team they ice is Staal's to command, and his game tonight showed that they might just be on to something. Staal had his best goal output of the season with a hat trick, and the 'Canes were 3 for 3 on the power play (something that just a day ago would have seemed impossible for a team that's been dismal on the man advantage this year). For the moment at least, it seems Carolina is in good hands.