Hurricanes vs. Panthers: Eastern Conference Final Game 2 news and updates – WRALSportsFan.com
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Posted May 22, 2025 5:30 p.m. EDTUpdated May 23, 2025 12:56 a.m. EDT
Raleigh, N.C. — The loudest house in the NHL was silenced and turned against its own Carolina Hurricanes on Thursday, and the team now faces a difficult task two games into the Eastern Conference Final.
The series is fast becoming a coronation of the Florida Panthers, winners of the last two conference finals, at the expense of the Hurricanes. Florida dominated the Hurricanes 5-0 in Raleigh in Game 2, taking a 2-0 lead in the best-of-seven series and sapping all of the energy from the Lenovo Center crowd.
Carolina has not led for one second of the series, and it feels worse than that. A “whooping” is how captain Jordan Staal described it.
“There was nothing good on this game for us,” Carolina coach Rod Brind’Amour said after the loss. “We’re going to have to learn from it, but everybody has to be better.”
Florida took the lead less than 80 seconds into Game 2 and the Canes never really came close to scoring. The offensive effort was so poor that fans began chanting “shoot the puck, shoot the puck” at times in the second period. They booed the home team at times.
Carolina, known for its volume of shots, had just seven shots on goal through two periods and 17 in the game. It is the fewest shots for the Hurricanes in any game since 2014 and the fewest for them in a playoff game since the 2006 Stanley Cup Final.
Taylor Hall: We just haven’t played the way we did in the first two rounds
“That’s just not our game, right?” Carolina forward Taylor Hall said. “That’s just not how we play. We generate offense by shooting pucks and getting them back, and then we draw a penalty, we get a rebound, we generate momentum and [offensive] zone face-offs by doing that. We just weren’t able to do it. We had chances to shoot and we didn’t. I think we’re all a little bit at a loss.”
The Hurricanes led the NHL with 31 home victories this season and were 5-0 at home through two rounds of these playoffs. But the Panthers, reigning Stanley Cup champs, outclassed Carolina in Game 2. Florida has outscored the Hurricanes 10-2 through two games, and Carolina pulled goaltender Frederik Anderson after two periods.
Andersen had been spectacular through two rounds, but he has allowed nine goals in five periods against Florida. Andersen entered the series with a 1.36 goals against average in the postseason. Florida scored three goals on five shots on goal in the first period. The Hurricanes pulled Andersen for the third period and replaced him with backup Pyotr Kochetkov.
“It wouldn’t have mattered who we had in the net tonight,” Brind’Amour said. “It wasn’t on him.”
Early in the first, Andrei Svechnikov turned the puck over in the Hurricanes’ zone, leading to a goal by Gustav Forsling off a pass from Matthew Tkachuk. It was Forsling’s first goal of the playoffs, and a poor start for Carolina.
Later in the period, the Panthers kept the puck in the Carolina zone, ending up with a 2-on-1 in front of the net. Tkachuk
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