Better luck next year: The Carolina Hurricanes are still in a really good position

They still have one big need. They also still have the assets to acquire it.

Welcome back to Better Luck Next Year, a series that will focus on each team as they get eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. What went wrong, why it went wrong, what (if anything) went right, and what is next. We continue today with the next team to be eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs: The Carolina Hurricanes.

The Carolina Hurricanes keep running into the same ceiling and the same problem.

They win a lot of regular season games, consistently win a round or two in the playoffs, and then fizzle out in the second round or Eastern Conference Finals.

In a lot of ways they are the Eastern Conference version of the Dallas Stars — an objectively good team across the board that is on the fringes of Stanley Cup contention, but is also just missing … something … that prevents them from taking the next step toward a championship.

And I don’t necessarily think it’s just bad luck or not getting enough bounces.

In Carolina’s case, their “something” might still be a top-tier, game-changing superstar that can take over a game or a series.

It’s not that the Hurricanes don’t have good players. They do. They have a lot of them. A lot of really good players. Every team in the league would want Sebastian Aho, Andrei Svechnikov, Jaccob Slavin, and Seth Jarvis on their team.

But is anybody here a true, top-of-the-league superstar? Is there anybody here that is going to consistently take over a series against another top-tier team? Who is the player that you, as an opposing fan, looks at and says “holy shit how do we stop THAT guy for seven games?”

The Connor McDavid. The Sidney Crosby. The Nathan MacKinnon. The Nikita Kucherov. The type of elite player that almost every Stanley Cup winning team has.

Carolina’s roster always seems to be the type of situation where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. There’s a ton of depth here, and there are not many obvious weaknesses going into each season. It’s also an incredibly well-coached, structured team that defends as well as anybody and can win the territorial fight on most nights. They will grind you down into dust, wear you out and keep coming at you in waves.

They don’t allow a lot of goals, and over the course of an 82-game season they score enough goals to be a fringe top-10 offense. They are consistently in the top-half of the league, but since the start of the 2018-19 season (when this run started) they have finished higher than ninth just one time and never higher than eighth.

It’s a very good, but not quite elite offense.

They have a deep, balanced roster, but they rarely have anybody that finishes in the top-20 (and certainly not in the top-10) of the league in individual scoring.

They typically win by volume and depth.

Over a full season, when they are playing 65 games against teams they are clearly better than, and early in the playoffs when they are playing a fringe wild-card team, all of that is going to produce a lot of wins.

But there is still something missing offensively that is keeping them from reaching the next level. It typically shows itself as they get deeper into the playoffs and start facing teams that can not only match their style and depth, but also have more higher-end talent at the top of the roster.

Over the past two years the Hurricanes have made serious efforts to add that sort of player.

At last year’s deadline it was Jake Guentzel, acquiring him from the Pittsburgh Penguins before losing him in free agency to the Tampa Bay Lightning.

This season it was an even bigger swing, going for Mikko Rantanen before trading him just a couple of months later when it became clear they were not going to be able to re-sign him.

While neither trade produced the desired result — both in terms of a championship or re-signing them — I respect the swings and the mindset. Would they have gotten closer to a championship this season had they taken one run at it with Rantanen?

Perhaps.

Maybe.

But even though the optics of trading for Rantanen, re-trading him, and then losing in another Eastern Conference Final are bad, I still don’t hate the situation it’s left the Hurricanes in going into this offseason.

In fact, I kind of love it for them.

They have options and the flexibility to take another big swing, and one that might stick around for longer than a few months.

Let’s talk about it.