The longer the Hurricanes’ road playoff losing streak gets, the heavier it feels

Antti Raanta promises the Carolina Hurricanes will win a road playoff game at some point in the not-too-distant future. That’s not a Mark Messier guarantee, just a feeling. A sense. A premonition.

“It’s coming,” Raanta said. “It’s coming.”

But that opportunity came and went Friday night.

New postseason, same road result.

If you told the Hurricanes they’d be tied 1-1 late in the third period, without an even-strength goal, without a power-play goal, the overused penalty-kill a perfect 4-for-4 with a short-handed goal, they would have taken that in a heartbeat, even if they hadn’t gone almost 23 months without a road playoff win.

Then the New York Islanders scored four goals in an NHL-record 138 seconds, breaking a record that dates back to 1944, and it only feels like it’s been that long since the Hurricanes won on the road.

“It’s kind of funny how it goes,” Raanta said. “First you feel like you can stop everything, and then one goes, and then the next one goes in. Hockey is a weird game. Being a goalie is sometimes weird. You feel like you’re unbeatable and then the net feels like it’s bigger than in soccer. It doesn’t matter whether it’s 2-1 or 5-1. A loss is a loss and you only get one from this.”

Only the first of those goals mattered, the Islanders’ first on the power play of the entire series and the 33rd shot on Raanta, who had been otherwise impeccable to that point, but the Hurricanes once again found themselves grasping for answers to obvious questions away from home.

There’s no rhyme or reason to this, no thread tying together this string of eight road playoff losses that dates back to an overtime win in Game 3 at the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2021, or their 2-12 record on the road since sweeping the Islanders in Brooklyn in 2019. Sometimes it’s goaltending. Sometimes it’s the power play. Sometimes it’s five-on-five.

Friday, it wasn’t the first but it was definitely the second two. When they didn’t get anything out of a solid road first period and a Derek Stepan turnover ended up in their net in the second, an already tough task — not only the opponent in the first playoff game in UBS Arena, but knowing the Islanders were going to get a favorable whistle after not getting a single power play in Game 2 — got even tougher.

“The power play cost us the game,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “That was clear. In the second, we had a couple, and we need to do more there. We can’t just rely on killing penalties. We need more from the power play.”

For all of the Hurricanes’ many strengths, their flaws seem to be magnified on the road, their trademark resilience nullified. It may merely be a tribute to the power of Jordan Staal’s line that when the Hurricanes can pick their matchups at home, they can dictate the pace and tempo of the game in a way they cannot on the road.

And last year, it was easy to point at the defensive pairings — Tony DeAngelo with Jaccob Slavin, the third pairing of Brendan Smith and Ian Cole — as easily victimized, making it almost impossible for the Hurricanes to win the matchup game against teams with top lines as heavily front-loaded as the Boston Bruins and New York Rangers.

But that’s not an issue with Brent Burns playing alongside Slavin, or with the upgrade to Jalen Chatfield and Shayne Gostisbehere, nor against an Islanders’ top line that’s been lukewarm at best. These wounds Friday were largely self-inflicted.

Despite the final score, this was a game decided by the finest of margins, the rare 5-1 result that had more than a whiff of overtime to it. If it wasn’t the continuation of an increasingly disturbing trend, it could be chalked up to the 0-for-3 power play — an official fourth power play in the final 2 seconds wasn’t even played, as the officials pulled the plug early to prevent any more fisticuffs — and everyone could move on to Sunday afternoon.

But they can’t, because each time this happens, each time the streak doesn’t end, it gets bigger. Another loss Sunday, and not only will they yet again have extended a series they could have snuffed out early thanks to starting on home ice, with all the long-term implications that contains, but the weight of this mental baggage will continue to grow.

It may be coming, as Raanta promised. But the Hurricanes need it to come soon.

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