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?
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