tommy
04-06-2003, 12:52 PM
I think it was a well written article, despite being harsh at points.
The stuff of myths, from joy to ignominy
Canes' follow-up season of disintegration was foreseen by coach who had been there
By LUKE DECOCK, Staff Writer
Outside, it was September and still sunny. Inside the RBC Center, so was the mood.
The Carolina Hurricanes were days from beginning training camp for the 2002-03 NHL season, the optimism and good feelings from their June trip to the Stanley Cup finals still lingering.
Yet the path they would follow on their journey to oblivion already was scribbled on a white board deep in the bowels of the arena.
Last summer, goalie coach Don Edwards had a series of conversations with his neighbor in Ontario cottage country, Larry Robinson.
Robinson had been a New Jersey assistant in 1996, when the Devils missed the playoffs after winning the Stanley Cup in 1995.
What Robinson told Edwards about how the season would unfold proved prescient. Edwards distilled Robinson's predictions into a chart he drew in black marker on the board in the concrete-block office of assistant coaches Kevin McCarthy and Randy Ladouceur:
Initial enthusiasm, fueled by the joy in greeting each other so soon after coming so close.
About two weeks into the season, a precipitous decline as the players realized how difficult it would be to muster the energy of the playoffs on a nightly basis.
Then, an inability to handle difficult stretches of the schedule. Drop-offs from key players. No off nights from opposing teams, who no longer would take the Canes lightly.
Later, a moment of crisis that could perhaps be fought off if the team stayed healthy. More likely, injuries -- a trickle that would become a flood. Finally, ignominy.
Edwards' graph was admired, discussed and erased by the coaches.
They could have left it up all season. It turned out to be the exact path the Canes followed, from training camp to midseason collapse to playoff elimination to dead last.
In a sense, Robinson's warning was unnecessary. Even the most modest student of hockey history knew the Canes would struggle to play with the same intensity they brought to the playoffs.
But no one, not even Robinson, could guess how far the Canes would fall -- or the seemingly endless chain of bizarre circumstances that turned a once-promising season into a sideshow.
Sami Kapanen and Bates Battaglia, 20-goal scorers the year before, went months without goals. Arturs Irbe went from the finals to the minors, suddenly unable, at age 36, to stop the puck.
Tough guy Jesse Boulerice was knocked out for the season with one punch. Damian Surma became the fifth Carolina rookie to score in his NHL debut -- a modern record -- but never played for the Canes again after injuring a shoulder in the post-goal celebration.
No one saw such oddities coming, but it was clear from the first week of training camp that things weren't the same as they had been less than three months earlier, three wins from the Stanley Cup.
Storm clouds gather
Rule No. 1 in hockey is: Don't worry about the exhibition season.
But privately, the players worried. After losing the final five exhibitions by a combined 24-5, Jeff O'Neill found himself saying, "We're getting beat 5-1 every game. It's only training camp, but it's not really normal."
The opener, with the banners raised to 15 minutes of applause, was a 4-1 loss to the New York Rangers. Fans booed at the end.
The Canes lost three of their first four games but then started to put some wins together -- seven in the next 11 games.
All was not well, though. The factors that would end up disabling the Canes -- the slumps by Kapanen and Battaglia contributing to a crippling lack of scoring, a rash of uncharacteristic defensive breakdowns and turnovers -- had surfaced.
One reason nobody noticed was because Kevin Weekes was playing so well.
Weekes had collapsed on the ice at the team's first practice, the victim of a seizure most likely brought on by dehydration. Despite missing most of the exhibition season, he put together a remarkable October and November, almost completely supplanting angry Irbe, who all but demanded a trade.
Weekes was at the top of his game when Detroit rolled into Raleigh on Nov. 29 for the only finals rematch of the season. The Canes were hot for revenge, and they took it -- scoring on five straight power plays for a 6-4 win.
But in the first period, Detroit's Kirk Maltby pushed Bret Hedican into Weekes, and as Hedican fell, he elbowed Weekes in the side of his head. Weekes missed three weeks with a concussion.
Irbe came in and held on for the win over Detroit and got road wins in Columbus and Nashville.
The Nashville win was Dec. 3, almost exactly a year after coach Paul Maurice had saved his job with a win over Florida. This season, though, the Canes were 12-7-4-3, five games above .500.
After the win at Nashville, Maurice quipped, "This is usually when I'm getting fired."
It was the last comic moment Maurice would have for months.
Foundation crumbles
The night after the win over Nashville, the Canes were playing the same gritty style that hearkened back to the playoffs, this time against the Panthers.
Carolina outshot Florida 15-4 in the first period. With the score tied 1-1 less than a minute in to the second, Viktor Kozlov tried to stuff the puck between Irbe's pads -- a desultory attempt at scoring, to say the least.
Kozlov seemed as surprised as anyone to see it pop out on the other side of Irbe and into the net.
At that moment, the collapse began. On the bench, the Canes were more stunned than angry, their mouths hanging open.
It was as if, seeing that goal, they said, "We have to work unspeakably hard to scrape out a single goal, and then we give up that? What's the point?"
The Canes lost 4-2 that night to begin a stretch in which they won just six times in 40 games.
In an effort to generate more offense, they lost the foundation of solid, principled defense upon which the finals team had been built. And the team was victim to some brutal turns of fate.
On Dec. 27, the Canes had a 2-0 lead at home on the Atlanta Thrashers. Carolina came down the ice on a three-on-one, looking to extend its lead. David Tanabe shot the puck into the glass behind the open net; Atlanta went down and scored at the other end. The Thrashers won 5-3, beating the Canes for the first time ever. The Canes never recovered, not that night, not this season. They were shut out in the next two games.
A 3-3 third-period tie in Buffalo on Jan. 3 turned into a 6-3 loss as injuries, for so long a nonfactor in the Hurricanes' dressing room, became the leitmotif of the second half of the season.
One after another
A year earlier, during the playoff run, the Canes lost one player to injury, a player who probably was coming out of the lineup anyway. One player!
They played all 23 games of the playoffs with essentially the same lineup -- nearly unprecedented in hockey history.
At first, there was nothing abnormal about this season. Glen Wesley pulled his groin during training camp, a pretty typical September injury.
Only Josef Vasicek seemed to have too short a summer. He missed almost all of camp after mysteriously reinjuring his surgically repaired shoulder at the end of August, then complained of a sore back as the season began.
Vasicek, a critical offensive threat in the playoffs, missed 25 games. His season was a wash, and he'd finish on a tentative note.
Certainly guys were playing hurt -- Ron Francis struggled through the first third of the season with a painful torn muscle in his back -- but nothing catastrophic happened until Hedican tried to come back too soon from the concussion he suffered Dec. 12 and Tanabe hurt a shoulder on New Year's Eve. That left the Canes dreadfully short-handed on defense, which was all too apparent at Buffalo.
Their absences ushered in a string of injuries nearly unprecedented in franchise history.
Rod Brind'Amour, the Canes' leading scorer at the time, was the first to fall. On Jan. 20, the torque of a faceoff shredded a tendon in his right hand.
On Jan. 30, Erik Cole knifed between two defensemen at Tampa Bay. His skate caught in a rut as he was sent spinning, and his right fibula snapped above the ankle.
Both were lost for the season, and the list only got longer:
Out for the season: Jeff Heerema, broken wrist; Jesse Boulerice, concussion; Jaroslav Svoboda, separated shoulder; Pavel Brendl, knee surgery; Jan Hlavac, broken finger; Patrick DesRochers, broken arm.
On the day Brind'Amour learned his season was over, Jan. 21, the Canes were 16-22-6-4. They won twice in the next month and a half.
Plummeting on wings of wax
On the plane home from Tampa the night Cole broke his leg, Maurice had the first foreboding feeling the Canes might not survive. His teams always had been resilient. Even that collapse in Buffalo was followed by a win the next night.
But the loss of Brind'Amour and Cole, two-thirds of the BBC Line -- and a horrible season from the other third, Battaglia -- might be too much to overcome. The pit of his stomach told him so.
On Feb. 7, there was no question. The Canes traded Kapanen that morning and lost 8-2 to the Los Angeles Kings that night. Heerema, who scored three goals in his first 10 NHL games, broke both bones in his right wrist.
Whether the Canes knew it or not before then, they knew that night. There would be no comeback, no charge to the finish.
Maurice, after the game, couldn't stop rubbing his hands together. His voice was flat, lacking emotion. The dark circles under his eyes, pronounced at the best of times, threatened to annex his entire face.
The team gathered for a late meal at a seafood restaurant near the hotel. The fish was excellent, the mood funereal.
On March 18, the Canes were eliminated from the playoffs. Ten players were injured, and Surma became the 11th with his celebration that night.
Marek Malik, Kapanen, Battaglia and Wesley -- all with more than 300 games for the franchise -- were gone. So was Irbe, banished to the minors.
The season Robinson had related to Edwards, which Edwards had sketched out so plainly for the rest of the coaching staff, had come to pass. Worse, even.
Although the Canes' hard-core fans have remained loyal, but the frenzy of the playoffs has been replaced among the general populace with the same passing disinterest that greeted the transplanted team six years ago.
Last summer, even the statue of George Washington at the state capitol donned a Canes sweater. This time, nobody is putting a Canes sweater on a statue -- not unless it is to give the pigeons a chance to express their thoughts on the season.
The Canes saw the obstacles coming, but they weren't good enough, talented enough or deep enough to overcome them. The team that went to the finals was a moderately talented team that thrived on hard work, discipline and health.
Missing all three, Carolina plummeted to absolute bottom.
In mythology, such a precipitous decline is always foretold.
The Canes knew their fate. It was written in black ink on a white board in September.
The stuff of myths, from joy to ignominy
Canes' follow-up season of disintegration was foreseen by coach who had been there
By LUKE DECOCK, Staff Writer
Outside, it was September and still sunny. Inside the RBC Center, so was the mood.
The Carolina Hurricanes were days from beginning training camp for the 2002-03 NHL season, the optimism and good feelings from their June trip to the Stanley Cup finals still lingering.
Yet the path they would follow on their journey to oblivion already was scribbled on a white board deep in the bowels of the arena.
Last summer, goalie coach Don Edwards had a series of conversations with his neighbor in Ontario cottage country, Larry Robinson.
Robinson had been a New Jersey assistant in 1996, when the Devils missed the playoffs after winning the Stanley Cup in 1995.
What Robinson told Edwards about how the season would unfold proved prescient. Edwards distilled Robinson's predictions into a chart he drew in black marker on the board in the concrete-block office of assistant coaches Kevin McCarthy and Randy Ladouceur:
Initial enthusiasm, fueled by the joy in greeting each other so soon after coming so close.
About two weeks into the season, a precipitous decline as the players realized how difficult it would be to muster the energy of the playoffs on a nightly basis.
Then, an inability to handle difficult stretches of the schedule. Drop-offs from key players. No off nights from opposing teams, who no longer would take the Canes lightly.
Later, a moment of crisis that could perhaps be fought off if the team stayed healthy. More likely, injuries -- a trickle that would become a flood. Finally, ignominy.
Edwards' graph was admired, discussed and erased by the coaches.
They could have left it up all season. It turned out to be the exact path the Canes followed, from training camp to midseason collapse to playoff elimination to dead last.
In a sense, Robinson's warning was unnecessary. Even the most modest student of hockey history knew the Canes would struggle to play with the same intensity they brought to the playoffs.
But no one, not even Robinson, could guess how far the Canes would fall -- or the seemingly endless chain of bizarre circumstances that turned a once-promising season into a sideshow.
Sami Kapanen and Bates Battaglia, 20-goal scorers the year before, went months without goals. Arturs Irbe went from the finals to the minors, suddenly unable, at age 36, to stop the puck.
Tough guy Jesse Boulerice was knocked out for the season with one punch. Damian Surma became the fifth Carolina rookie to score in his NHL debut -- a modern record -- but never played for the Canes again after injuring a shoulder in the post-goal celebration.
No one saw such oddities coming, but it was clear from the first week of training camp that things weren't the same as they had been less than three months earlier, three wins from the Stanley Cup.
Storm clouds gather
Rule No. 1 in hockey is: Don't worry about the exhibition season.
But privately, the players worried. After losing the final five exhibitions by a combined 24-5, Jeff O'Neill found himself saying, "We're getting beat 5-1 every game. It's only training camp, but it's not really normal."
The opener, with the banners raised to 15 minutes of applause, was a 4-1 loss to the New York Rangers. Fans booed at the end.
The Canes lost three of their first four games but then started to put some wins together -- seven in the next 11 games.
All was not well, though. The factors that would end up disabling the Canes -- the slumps by Kapanen and Battaglia contributing to a crippling lack of scoring, a rash of uncharacteristic defensive breakdowns and turnovers -- had surfaced.
One reason nobody noticed was because Kevin Weekes was playing so well.
Weekes had collapsed on the ice at the team's first practice, the victim of a seizure most likely brought on by dehydration. Despite missing most of the exhibition season, he put together a remarkable October and November, almost completely supplanting angry Irbe, who all but demanded a trade.
Weekes was at the top of his game when Detroit rolled into Raleigh on Nov. 29 for the only finals rematch of the season. The Canes were hot for revenge, and they took it -- scoring on five straight power plays for a 6-4 win.
But in the first period, Detroit's Kirk Maltby pushed Bret Hedican into Weekes, and as Hedican fell, he elbowed Weekes in the side of his head. Weekes missed three weeks with a concussion.
Irbe came in and held on for the win over Detroit and got road wins in Columbus and Nashville.
The Nashville win was Dec. 3, almost exactly a year after coach Paul Maurice had saved his job with a win over Florida. This season, though, the Canes were 12-7-4-3, five games above .500.
After the win at Nashville, Maurice quipped, "This is usually when I'm getting fired."
It was the last comic moment Maurice would have for months.
Foundation crumbles
The night after the win over Nashville, the Canes were playing the same gritty style that hearkened back to the playoffs, this time against the Panthers.
Carolina outshot Florida 15-4 in the first period. With the score tied 1-1 less than a minute in to the second, Viktor Kozlov tried to stuff the puck between Irbe's pads -- a desultory attempt at scoring, to say the least.
Kozlov seemed as surprised as anyone to see it pop out on the other side of Irbe and into the net.
At that moment, the collapse began. On the bench, the Canes were more stunned than angry, their mouths hanging open.
It was as if, seeing that goal, they said, "We have to work unspeakably hard to scrape out a single goal, and then we give up that? What's the point?"
The Canes lost 4-2 that night to begin a stretch in which they won just six times in 40 games.
In an effort to generate more offense, they lost the foundation of solid, principled defense upon which the finals team had been built. And the team was victim to some brutal turns of fate.
On Dec. 27, the Canes had a 2-0 lead at home on the Atlanta Thrashers. Carolina came down the ice on a three-on-one, looking to extend its lead. David Tanabe shot the puck into the glass behind the open net; Atlanta went down and scored at the other end. The Thrashers won 5-3, beating the Canes for the first time ever. The Canes never recovered, not that night, not this season. They were shut out in the next two games.
A 3-3 third-period tie in Buffalo on Jan. 3 turned into a 6-3 loss as injuries, for so long a nonfactor in the Hurricanes' dressing room, became the leitmotif of the second half of the season.
One after another
A year earlier, during the playoff run, the Canes lost one player to injury, a player who probably was coming out of the lineup anyway. One player!
They played all 23 games of the playoffs with essentially the same lineup -- nearly unprecedented in hockey history.
At first, there was nothing abnormal about this season. Glen Wesley pulled his groin during training camp, a pretty typical September injury.
Only Josef Vasicek seemed to have too short a summer. He missed almost all of camp after mysteriously reinjuring his surgically repaired shoulder at the end of August, then complained of a sore back as the season began.
Vasicek, a critical offensive threat in the playoffs, missed 25 games. His season was a wash, and he'd finish on a tentative note.
Certainly guys were playing hurt -- Ron Francis struggled through the first third of the season with a painful torn muscle in his back -- but nothing catastrophic happened until Hedican tried to come back too soon from the concussion he suffered Dec. 12 and Tanabe hurt a shoulder on New Year's Eve. That left the Canes dreadfully short-handed on defense, which was all too apparent at Buffalo.
Their absences ushered in a string of injuries nearly unprecedented in franchise history.
Rod Brind'Amour, the Canes' leading scorer at the time, was the first to fall. On Jan. 20, the torque of a faceoff shredded a tendon in his right hand.
On Jan. 30, Erik Cole knifed between two defensemen at Tampa Bay. His skate caught in a rut as he was sent spinning, and his right fibula snapped above the ankle.
Both were lost for the season, and the list only got longer:
Out for the season: Jeff Heerema, broken wrist; Jesse Boulerice, concussion; Jaroslav Svoboda, separated shoulder; Pavel Brendl, knee surgery; Jan Hlavac, broken finger; Patrick DesRochers, broken arm.
On the day Brind'Amour learned his season was over, Jan. 21, the Canes were 16-22-6-4. They won twice in the next month and a half.
Plummeting on wings of wax
On the plane home from Tampa the night Cole broke his leg, Maurice had the first foreboding feeling the Canes might not survive. His teams always had been resilient. Even that collapse in Buffalo was followed by a win the next night.
But the loss of Brind'Amour and Cole, two-thirds of the BBC Line -- and a horrible season from the other third, Battaglia -- might be too much to overcome. The pit of his stomach told him so.
On Feb. 7, there was no question. The Canes traded Kapanen that morning and lost 8-2 to the Los Angeles Kings that night. Heerema, who scored three goals in his first 10 NHL games, broke both bones in his right wrist.
Whether the Canes knew it or not before then, they knew that night. There would be no comeback, no charge to the finish.
Maurice, after the game, couldn't stop rubbing his hands together. His voice was flat, lacking emotion. The dark circles under his eyes, pronounced at the best of times, threatened to annex his entire face.
The team gathered for a late meal at a seafood restaurant near the hotel. The fish was excellent, the mood funereal.
On March 18, the Canes were eliminated from the playoffs. Ten players were injured, and Surma became the 11th with his celebration that night.
Marek Malik, Kapanen, Battaglia and Wesley -- all with more than 300 games for the franchise -- were gone. So was Irbe, banished to the minors.
The season Robinson had related to Edwards, which Edwards had sketched out so plainly for the rest of the coaching staff, had come to pass. Worse, even.
Although the Canes' hard-core fans have remained loyal, but the frenzy of the playoffs has been replaced among the general populace with the same passing disinterest that greeted the transplanted team six years ago.
Last summer, even the statue of George Washington at the state capitol donned a Canes sweater. This time, nobody is putting a Canes sweater on a statue -- not unless it is to give the pigeons a chance to express their thoughts on the season.
The Canes saw the obstacles coming, but they weren't good enough, talented enough or deep enough to overcome them. The team that went to the finals was a moderately talented team that thrived on hard work, discipline and health.
Missing all three, Carolina plummeted to absolute bottom.
In mythology, such a precipitous decline is always foretold.
The Canes knew their fate. It was written in black ink on a white board in September.