MORRISVILLE, N.C. — It had to end sometime, and it ended the way it always does, with bad goals and weird penalties and the deep echo of bad memories — in this case, the increasingly dark shadow of Madison Square Garden.
The Carolina Hurricanes went five and a half weeks without losing, won 11 in a row and the crazy thing about it (other than that they failed to gain any significant ground on the Boston Bruins) is they still haven’t scratched their presumed ceiling.
For six weeks, the Hurricanes kept piling up wins and points without their No. 1 goaltender, without a reliable power play, with key players sporadically injured and without Max Pacioretty, whose long-awaited debut appears all but imminent.
Which suggests, as high as they flew in December, their best days may still yet lie ahead as they went back to work Wednesday with a long practice at Wake Competition Center ahead of Thursday’s home game against the Nashville Predators.
Pacioretty can potentially slot into the lineup and start finishing some of the chances the Hurricanes excel at creating. It’s been a long wait and recovery for the winger who tore his Achilles shortly after arriving over the summer, but the end is at hand.
“We’re close,” Pacioretty said. “You can see in practice I’m skating with a line, playing on the power play, with no restrictions in terms of contact — maybe some guys ease up on me because they don’t want to give me any contact — but it’s close. We’ll take it day by day right now.”
Meanwhile, the solid combined play of Antti Raanta and Pyotr Kotchetkov not only backstopped the streak but has allowed Frederik Andersen the luxury of a month of practices to fine-tune his return. Andersen will be back at some point — sooner than later, presumably — and in theory gives the Hurricanes the best chance to win the Stanley Cup, if fully healthy.
As for the power play, maybe Pacioretty can help with that? Because given the assembled skill and track record of this group, there’s no excuse for a bottom-tier power play. (The penalty-kill, usually such a strength, remains in the middle of the pack, but without any real cause for alarm.) Special teams were such an issue in the postseason last time around, you’d like to see some momentum develop at some point.
“All of it, all of our game, can be better,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “We’ve had stints here and there at things, but I would expect that. You’re always working on something. We definitely know the special teams have to be better, because you saw last night, you can get crazy calls. You can be playing the best game and then boom, boom, boom, there’s three penalties that were not penalties.”
Nevertheless, when you’re doing things that haven’t been done since that season — December was the Hurricanes’ best month since January 2006 — you’re doing something right. It’s a little crazy now to look back to mid-November and all the hand-wringing over the Hurricanes’ failure to dominate the opposition out of the gate.
Even now, they’re not exactly dominating all the time, but they’re doing what good teams do: Finding ways to win, at their best and at less than that. Until Tuesday night’s loss at the New York Rangers, at least, and even that wasn’t out of reach until things got weird late.
There’s certainly a duality here. The Hurricanes are where they’re supposed to be in the standings, thanks to this latest run of results, but they’re still not the team they are capable of being, not quite. The former is the only thing that matters right now. The latter is the only thing that will matter in the end.
So there’s no reason why that loss has to be anything but a footnote. There’s still so much potential for growth here. Another six-week streak would bring the Hurricanes to the gates of Carter-Finley Stadium next month. They’ve shown they’re as good as anyone. Now they have to show just how good they can be.
