Carolina Hurricanes vs. New Jersey Devils: 2023 Stanley Cup playoff series preview and pick
Schedule (ET)
| Date | Game | Time |
| Wednesday, May 3 | 1. New Jersey at Carolina | 7 p.m. ET |
| Friday, May 5 | 2. New Jersey at Carolina | TBD |
Additional dates and start times will be confirmed later this week.
The Skinny
The Carolina Hurricanes and New Jersey Devils have been on a collision course all season but took very different paths to their conference semifinal showdown.
The Metropolitan Division champion Hurricanes never lost control of their opening series and ultimately overmatched New York Islanders. After a third-period collapse in Game 3 threatened to invite the Isles back into the series, Carolina coolly dispatched their division rivals on the road in Game 4 to take a 3-1 series lead. Things again threatened to get hairy when Game 6 at the UBS Arena went into overtime, but the Hurricanes put the game away and gave themselves some badly needed extra days off.
The Devils, whose title challenge for the Metro crown did not end until the last day of the season, had a decidedly more nervy start to their postseason campaign. Chris Kreider repeatedly punched holes through their defense, and the Rangers won the first two playoff games at the Prudential Center since Andy Greene was the Devils’ captain by a combined score of 10-2.
Coach Lindy Ruff then decided to sit goaltender Vitek Vanecek for the talented but untested Akira Schmid, and the Devils never looked back. Schmid won 4 of his 5 starts and shut the Rangers out in Game 7 to win the Devils their first playoff series since 2012. Having found their stride and won an elimination game, the Devils are not the jittery team that came into these playoffs.
Head to Head
Carolina: 2-2
New Jersey: 2-1-1
The Devils collected one more point in a split season series with the Hurricanes thanks to a shootout loss in their second meeting. The goal differential was every bit as close as the record, with New Jersey edging the final tally 13-11. Interestingly, neither projected Game 1 starter, Schmid and Carolina’s Frederik Andersen, appeared in any of the regular season matchups. New Jersey shut out Carolina en route to a 3-0 victory in their lone meeting after the trade deadline behind three-point performances from Jack Hughes and Jesper Bratt.
Top Five Scorers
Carolina
Sebastian Aho, 7 points
Brent Burns, 5 points
Seth Jarvis, 4 points
Stefan Noesen, 4 points
Paul Stastny, 3 points
New Jersey
Erik Haula, 6 points
Nico Hischier, 5 points
Jack Hughes, 5 points
Ondrej Palat, 5 points
Jesper Bratt, 4 points
X-Factor
Schmid would be the obvious choice as the X-factor in this series. The Boston Bruins’ epic collapse notwithstanding, he has been the story of the postseason so far. The young netminder shut out the vaunted Rangers attack twice in five games during his first-ever playoff series. The Hurricanes just toppled Ilya Sorokin, though. Unless Schmid is markedly better than Sorokin, and no one is, Schmid is not the one true difference-maker in this matchup.
The showdown between the Hurricanes and Devils will be decided by the production (or lack thereof) of New Jersey’s Meier-Hischier-Bratt line. No other unit for either team possesses as much talent as the trio, and the Devils had 68 percent of the game’s scoring chances when it was on the ice at even strength. The problem? None of those chances went in.
Meier (40G), Hischier (31G), and Bratt (32G) all set career highs in goals during the regular season, and each of the three converted on more than 12 percent of their shots. Of their 63 combined first-round attempts, however, just one went in, a Bratt empty-netter at the end of Game 7. The line left so many goals on the ice that Ruff had to shuffle Meier down the lineup in favor of Tomas Tatar for the winner-take-all contest.
While Hischier, a Selke Trophy contender, has five assists and is effective even when he is not producing offense, Bratt has not shown his usual opportunism, and Meier, the team’s marquee trade acquisition, has not made it onto the scoresheet at all. The Devils have more talent than Carolina, but that will not matter if their best forwards continue to pass the buck to role players.
Offense
The Hurricanes have struggled to score since Andrei Svechnikov’s ACL injury in March, and they did not get any better at it during the first round of the playoffs. Carolina averaged just 2.67 goals against the notoriously stingy Islanders; nine of their 16 tallies came in Games 2 and 4.
Worse yet, Teuvo Teravainen, Carolina’s third-most pedigreed forward behind Sebastian Aho and Martin Necas, had his hand broken by a J-G Pageau slash during Game 2 and is out indefinitely. Without Svechnikov and Teravainen, the Hurricanes have become even more reliant on Aho, Necas, and a blueline led by former Norris Trophy winner Brent Burns for scoring.
Aho has been up to the challenge and scored four goals and 7 points in the series victory. So has Burns, whose five assists pace the team. For his part, Necas came up small after a stellar regular season during which he collected 28 goals and a team-leading 71 points. The Czech scored just a single goal and struggled to a minus-5 rating. He and frequent linemates Stefan Noesen and Jesperi Kotkaniemi were the three most out-chanced Hurricanes to play the entire series; if Necas’ unit is that poor against a Devils team with far more scoring potential than the Islanders, the rest of Rod Brind’Amour’s team will be severely handicapped.
Another concern is that Brady Skjei and Shayne Gostisbehere combined for just one point from the blueline, leaving Burns just as lonely on the scoresheet as Aho.
The Devils also struggled to generate offense in the first round, but for different reasons. They have the depth that has eluded Carolina for months, but the slow start of perhaps their best line limited their scoring potential. When the dust settled on the first round, only the Minnesota Wild scored fewer goals per game than New Jersey’s 2.43.
The Devils need not despair over their toothlessness yet, though. Where Carolina’s modest scoring numbers in the first round continued a months-long trend, New Jersey’s impotence seems more like an outlier. It is statistically unlikely that Meier, Hischier, Bratt, and Tatar (1G in 7GP), who combined for 124 regular-season goals, are so ineffective in front of goal for a second-consecutive series. Still, the Hurricanes are not the team to thaw out against.
With some of their best scorers off-color, New Jersey got the production they needed to beat New York from their other top-six group, Ondrej Palat, Hughes, and Erik Haula, which accounted for 9 of their 17 goals. Haula led the team in goals (4) and points (6), and the coupling of his and Palat’s veteran savvy with Hughes’s dynamism on the rush created issues for the Rangers all series long. If Hughes’ line continues to hold up its end of the bargain while the rest of the team finds its footing, the Devils’ inability to finish will go from a pressing issue to a blip on the radar.
Defense
The Hurricanes’ bread and butter is their relentless forecheck and puck possession. That did not change during the first round when they outshot their opponents more than any other team. Carolina may lack a cutting edge on those shots, converting on a second-lowest 7.6% of them, but the amount of time they have the puck keeps the opposition off the board. That shows in their team defense, which was second-best in the NHL in both the regular season and the first round.
On the rare occasion that other teams gain the zone on the Hurricanes, they do not stay there for long thanks to capable stay-at-home defensemen like Jaccob Slavin, whose partnership with Burns has yielded strong returns, and Brett Pesce. A veteran checking line of Jordan Martinook, Jordan Staal, and Jesper Fast and an absurdly dominant penalty kill that stifled 94.4 percent of power plays during the first round bolsters the Hurricanes’ defense. If the Hurricanes can render the Devils as harmless as they did the Islanders, whose 15 goals were the second-fewest of any first-round team, their offensive issues may not matter after all.
The Devils’ defense’s nightmare beginning to their opening series doomed Vanecek’s starting position, as Kreider lived in their crease, and the playoffs seemed too big an occasion for the team.
During their first trip to Madison Square Garden, though, the Devils figured out the Rangers and adopted a defensive style that resembled Carolina’s. They were content to stifle New York’s zone entries and dump-ins until the opportunity arose to spring their speedy forwards on the rush, and by the series’ end, no team had allowed fewer shots per game than the Devils. By denying the Rangers the simple play, they forced their rivals into the overambitious, momentum-killing mistakes their next opponents love.
Ryan Graves and John Marino log the big minutes for New Jersey, while elsewhere in the top-four, defensive D-man Jonas Siegenthaler enables the offensive prowess of Dougie Hamilton, who scored in overtime to win Game 3. All three Devils pairs dominated chance shares in the first round as Ruff coached rings around Gerard Gallant. It will be interesting to see whether he uses the same tactics on a Carolina team that is far less talented but much more disciplined than the Rangers.
Goaltending
Nothing about the goaltending situation in Raleigh has been simple in 2022-2023, and that is not about to change during the conference semifinals. Veterans Andersen and Antti Raanta and rookie Pyotr Kochetkov split the regular season three ways; none of them started more than fiv -straight contests. Raanta got the nod for the first five games against New York and was good but not dominant, saving .906 percent of shots. After the former Phoenix Coyote gave up three goals on 22 shots in a series-extending Game 5 loss, coach Rod Brind’Amour determined that the ailing Andersen was at last ready to debut in the 2023 Stanley Cup Playoffs. The two-time Jennings Trophy winner did not disappoint, stopping 33 of 34 shots to end the Isles’ season.
Though he was worse than Raanta in the regular season, Andersen has the greater playoff experience and higher ceiling, and that is why Brind’Amour will ride his hot hand after an excellent, series-winning performance. The Dane will have a leash just as short as Raanta’s was in the first round, though, given the quality of both options.
Despite Andersen’s Game 6 heroics, the Canes find themselves on the wrong end of the goaltending matchup for the second series in a row. When you’re hot, you’re hot, and Schmid is just about thermonuclear. Analysts love to remind viewers that he is only a few years removed from playing in the USHL, but Schmid is the furthest thing from out of place.
Against a Rangers team that came within two victories of the Stanley Cup Final a year ago, the rookie went 4-1 with a 1.38 GAA and .951 save percentage. Those are obscenely dominant splits, and unlike with other recent sensations like Jake Oettinger and Thatcher Demko, Schmid’s team is not exactly hanging him out to dry. If the Devils play as well in front of Schmid as they have been, the Hurricanes’ scoring problems could reach a new low.
Injuries
The Hurricanes will have forward Jack Drury back for Game 1 after he missed a pair of contests thanks to an upper-body injury. A former second-round pick, Drury has yet to fulfill his potential but adds a warm NHL body to an injury-ravaged Hurricanes roster. Brind’Amour’s group is so thin that Mackenzie MacEachern, who did not play in an NHL game during the regular season, played on Aho’s line for Game 6.
The Devils expect to travel to North Carolina with a full complement of players. Their fans were relieved that Meier returned to the bench after taking a devastating hit courtesy of Rangers’ captain Jacob Trouba late in Game 7.
Intangibles
New Jersey looked overwhelmed by just their second playoff appearance in the past decade when the Rangers shellacked them in front of their home fans, but they quickly made up for those results on the road. Slow starts at home are never ideal, but against Carolina, they could be damning.
The Hurricanes are 19-9 at PNC Arena in the postseason since former team captain Brind’Amour took the reins as coach in 2018. His group has made home ice a fortress and will seek to jump out to the same 2-0 lead it took against the Islanders. If that happens, the Devils need to learn from the adversity they have already weathered and buckle down at home, or the series will be over before they know it.
Series Prediction
The Hurricanes were admirably professional in the opening round, but their litany of injuries makes the gap in talent in this series enormous. The Devils have more reasons to believe than a worn-out Carolina team frustrated by its inability to reach the next level. They will roll as Meier gets off the mark and Schmid’s heroics continue.
New Jersey Devils in five games.