The Carolina Hurricanes enjoyed one of the thrills of the season this week.
Now they’ll have to recharge with the Central Division-leading Dallas Stars arriving for Saturday night’s game in Raleigh, N.C.
The Hurricanes pulled out a 1-0 victory against the Florida Panthers on Thursday night with a last-minute goal in the rematch of last spring’s Eastern Conference finals.
“You try to build your game every day,” Carolina forward Sebastian Aho said. “We know we can do it in a big time.”
Aho has recorded back-to-back game-winning goals for Carolina. He scored the difference-maker against the Chicago Blackhawks in a 6-3 win Monday.
“You just want to come out on the winning side of these games,” Aho said. “It feels good.”
The Hurricanes have won four games in a row and six of their last seven games. The lone defeat in that stretch came Feb. 13 at Dallas, where the Stars won 4-2.
Since that game, Dallas has gone 1-2-2 with a season-worst four consecutive defeats. The Stars will try to avoid a winless four-game road trip after stops to play Boston, the New York Islanders and Ottawa.
“This is a league where you have to earn your wins and we’ve been pretty good about that all year,” Stars coach Peter DeBoer said. “But we weren’t in the game (Thursday night at Ottawa) right from the drop of the puck.”
In the game after the first clash with Carolina, the Stars posted nine goals at Nashville, but they had a total of eight goals in the four games that followed that big outburst. Dallas put only 15 shots on goal at Ottawa.
“We were very disjointed, out of sync,” Stars center Matt Duchene said. “I don’t think it was a work ethic thing, I think we just didn’t execute. We didn’t execute on the breakouts, we didn’t execute on the forecheck. We shot when we should have passed. We passed when we should have shot.”
DeBoer called the Senators game about as bad as a loss could be. His players tended to agree.
“It doesn’t mean you accept it,” Duchene said. “It means you understand it, you fix it and move forward. … The nice thing is we have put ourselves in a great position to have these games every now and then and have it not cost anything. But it’s how we react to it now.”
Against the Panthers, Hurricanes goalie Pyotr Kochetkov delivered a career-high, 44-save shutout after serving as a backup the two previous games.
“The one goal was all we got, so we needed him to be perfect — and he was,” Carolina coach Rod Brind’Amour said.
Kochetkov has three shutouts this season. The two-most recent blankings have come in 1-0 results.
The Hurricanes have had Tony DeAngelo in the lineup this week because of an injury to defenseman Jalen Chatfield.
Carolina has at least one point in 17 of its last 21 home games. This three-game homestand has had extremes as visitors, with the league-worst Chicago Blackhawks the first opponent before Florida (78 points) arrived.
Duchene, Jason Robertson, Joe Pavelski and Jani Hakanpaa all had two points for the Stars in the meeting with Carolina earlier this month. Hakanpaa, a defenseman, played briefly for the Hurricanes three seasons ago.
–Field Level Media
