Raleigh
It’s hard to find anything wrong with the Carolina Hurricanes after Friday night’s clinical dismantling of the Columbus Blue Jackets, but that’s hardly the standard by which the Hurricanes are measuring themselves.
With Tony DeAngelo out until around the March 21 trade deadline, the time for the Hurricanes to decide what they’re going to do — mortgage some of the future to bolster the roster for the postseason or stand pat — has arrived.
There’s an obvious need for a top-four defenseman capable of playing with Jaccob Slavin against the opposition’s best, especially in playoff games on the road when the Slavin-DeAngelo pairing can’t be protected against Tampa Bay’s Nikita Kucherov or Florida’s Aleksander Barkov. And as good as DeAngelo has been, not only on the power play but in his own end as well, the memory of Sebastian Aho turning him inside out in the 2019 preliminary round is hard to shake.
“A defenseman would be nice,” Hurricanes general manager Don Waddell told the N&O before Friday’s 4-0 win. “If you get into a long playoff run, you can easily go through nine or 10 defensemen. But in saying that, we’re also in LTI (long-term injured reserve). We’re not growing any cap space.”
The Hurricanes have just over $1 million in long-term injury relief and could probably manipulate their roster to squeeze that up to $1.8 million, but unlike regular cap space, that doesn’t pro-rate. With $1 million in actual cap space, they could add someone making $4 million for the final 20 games. With $1 million in LTIR space, they can only add someone making $1 million.
There’s also the question of what they could give up. Their first-round pick in June went to Montreal as part of the Jesperi Kotkaniemi offer sheet and Waddell said the Hurricanes would almost certainly not part with their 2023 first-rounder. And while the Hurricanes have restocked their system with 33 picks in the past three drafts — Seth Jarvis has already made the jump — there’s a sense that some of those prospects are almost NHL-ready, whether that’s Jack Drury or Ville Koivunen.
Someone like Ryan Suzuki, the 2019 first-round pick who has battled injuries and is behind Drury in the pecking order, might be their most marketable asset — especially if Montreal, where his brother Nick plays, is involved — but even then the Hurricanes still think he’s going to be an NHL player, although his ceiling remains a little uncertain.
So the combination of the cap situation and their hesitance to part with prospects makes a deal unlikely at this point, although that could change at the deadline if some of the players whose prices are high now linger on the market.
It’s more of an existential question than anything: While the Hurricanes’ window to contend will remain open in a macro sense as long as the Jaccob Slavin-Sebastian Aho core is intact, this is also the end of a micro window, with Vincent Trocheck and Nino Niederreiter potentially departing as a free agents and Jordan Staal turning 34 in September. Is that worth throwing chips on the table they wouldn’t normally consider gambling?
And to take on more than $1.8 million in salary, that means giving up more assets to either get the trading team to retain some salary or bring in a third team to cook the salary-cap books. Then the opportunity cost starts to get really big — and Waddell said the Hurricanes aren’t interested in giving up anyone already on the roster.
“That’s the avenue, if we do go into the trade deadline, the chips you’re going to use are some of your young prospects,” Waddell said. “We like everybody on our team. We don’t want to hurt our team at this point.”
It’s also important to remember that a lot of the business contending teams do at this time of year, adding veteran depth players, is business the Hurricanes handled over the summer. Derek Stepan, Ian Cole and Brendan Smith are all the kind of experienced players teams look to acquire for the stretch run and the playoffs. The Hurricanes, after getting pinched by depth issues during the playoffs last spring, tried to get ahead of the curve, and it helps that Jalen Chatfield has added his name to the mix.
Still, it’s hard not to shake the sense that this team could use a little reinforcement, even after such a comprehensive victory as this, and while there’s a case to be made for help on the right wing, defense is the most glaring need, even when DeAngelo comes back.
“The test is going to be over time, not one game,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “We’re going to miss Tony for a long time.”
In a best-case scenario, Ethan Bear returns to his pre-COVID form and the Hurricanes have the option of swapping him and DeAngelo on Slavin’s right as needed or warranted. But that’s a gamble, and if the Hurricanes are going to make a deep run and contend for the Stanley Cup, the less uncertainty the better.
This story was originally published February 26, 2022 7:00 AM.
