RALEIGH, N.C. — Twice in the Lenovo Center press box, I got pity texts.
One of them: “Is this as ugly in person as it is on TV?”
Very mean! Not a nice thing to say about any hockey game, really, let alone one featuring two of the Eastern Conference’s best teams. The Washington Capitals and Carolina Hurricanes were doing their jobs. They were feeling each other out. “This is the way things go once we get into mid-May” is where I landed. Not everything is going to be Game 7 between the Stars and Avalanche. Not every game can be a track meet. If they were all good, none would be great. Every bag of trail mix has some raisins.
But yeah, to answer the question, it was ugly. Objectively ugly. There is sport for the aesthetically minded; there is sport for the casual observer; and then there was whatever Capitals-Hurricanes, Game 3, delivered to those of us who watched it play out on Saturday night.
Carolina, of course, will take it; after a 4-0 win, it holds a 2-1 series lead. Rod Brind’Amour’s team — less concerned with style points than the average on most days, let’s say — needed to stop Washington’s hard-earned forward momentum before it turned into something bigger, and the Canes needed to retain the home-ice advantage they gained at Capital One Arena. Done and done.
And now, the temptation might be to turn this outcome into a neat little short story that sums up Hurricanes hockey. When you make shot volume and tenacious forechecking your stock and trade — when you have that stapled to your forehead, like Brind’Amour’s teams have seemed to at times over the last decade or so — it can be easy to forget that individually great performances aren’t a luxury. They’re a necessity.
Brind’Amour, of course, knows this. He’s dealing with a narrative based at least partially on convenience. We know the Hurricanes play a certain way. We know what he values. And too often — especially for the hockey media at large, who watch Carolina’s reliable regular-season dominance from afar, then parachute in when the games get tough and the margins get slimmer — it turns into a bit of a feedback cycle. The Hurricanes are good because they’re deep and they’re deep because they’re good.
That’s what made Game 3 more important than you might’ve thought as you watched it; this wasn’t the Hurricanes’ hive mind. This wasn’t them as a monolith. This was a team seizing control of a series on the backs of its most talented forward and its starting goaltender. All those shot attempts helped. On Saturday, though, they weren’t the show.
It started with Frederik Andersen, who had to exit Carolina’s first-round win over the New Jersey Devils in Game 4 after a net-front collision with Timo Meier. Pyotr Kochetkov took over for the Game 5 clincher, but in Brind’Amour’s perfect world, he’s the backup.
The problem for Andersen, now and over the course of his career, is that injuries are a part of that world. He missed about half of the regular season with a knee injury that required surgery. In 2023-24, a blood clotting issue kept him out until April. That sort of thing, closer to the rule than the exception, combined with a relative lack of emphasis on the position in Carolina — no team technically needs its goaltender less — makes Andersen too easy to ignore.
On Saturday, he took away that option, snuffing out the Capitals’ nine first-period shots and eight high-danger scoring chances. The former is a huge number for this series; the latter is a huge number for any series. It started early, too, when he stopped Tom Wilson — a game-wrecker not quite like any other — in close right after puck drop.
There were more, though. Jack Roslovic knows it.
“If it weren’t for Freddie, it could’ve been different,” said Roslovic, who put Carolina up 2-0 with a power-play goal 63 seconds before the second intermission. “He saved my ass a couple times.”
Roslovic wasn’t alone. We’d seen that from Capitals goalie Logan Thompson already in this series — the type of play that buys a team time and gives it hope. Now it was Andersen’s turn. This wasn’t system goaltending. This was something more.
“He kept us in the game,” Brind’Amour said. “I thought we got to it a little bit in the second half of that game, but it could’ve been a lot different if we were chasing it.”
Carolina’s push started in the second period. Washington, after two games’ worth of prelude and progress, had finally outplayed the Hurricanes at five-on-five for a full period. Capitals coach Spencer Carbery, for days, has said his team needed to find another level. It was no longer hypothetical. It wasn’t about luck or timeliness. The Caps were, on balance, the better team.
Brind’Amour shuffled his lines in response, most consequentially moving Seth Jarvis back up alongside Sebastian Aho and Andrei Svechnikov, and it worked. Carolina started to see its zone time increase and its shot attempt edge return. The ice began to flip. It was Svechnikov who punched through.
And Svechnikov can be a tough player to talk about. Combinations of speed, skill, skating, size and physicality like his are rare, and the package is a blessing until it’s not; to watch him, at times, is to feel like you’re watching one of the 10 or 15 most gifted hockey players on the planet. The production, though, has never quite followed; injuries are the primary cause. Brind’Amour’s system, though, might play a part, too. What would a free-range Svechnikov look like, exactly? We may never know.
After an uneven regular season, he was the best player on the ice against New Jersey. In Round 2, he’d come close, hitting two posts and gently reminding reporters on Saturday morning of that fact. A few hours later, after Brind’Amour’s line changes really started to take, he lined up for an offensive zone faceoff to the right of Aho. Washington’s Nic Dowd won it backward and Svechnikov pounced, leaving Capitals defenseman John Carlson flat-footed, gathering the puck and snapping it over Thompson’s shoulder.
“To be honest, it wasn’t planned,” Svechnikov said. “I just saw the puck kind of loose.”
Andrei Svechnikov opens the scoring for the @Canes! 🚨 #StanleyCup
🇺🇸: @NHL_On_TNT & @SportsonMax ➡️ https://t.co/4TuyIATi3T
🇨🇦: @Sportsnet or stream on Sportsnet+ ➡️ https://t.co/4KjbdjVctF pic.twitter.com/VsN1A7bljF— NHL (@NHL) May 10, 2025
Brind’Amour said the same.
“Svech was on his toes and the puck just happened to go there,” he said, “but then you’ve got to make the play.” He had the opportunity to give more credit for the goal, had he wanted, to the zone time that set up the faceoff. He passed.
“Sometimes you need those individual efforts. We had that tonight. This one, more for me, is what it was about tonight.”
The next one might call for something different. It might deliver something prettier. But if we get another 60 minutes of solid tactical play laced with bits of brilliance, it won’t be all bad.
(Photo: James Guillory / Imagn Images)