Vegas Squeezed The Canes And Got The Juice

You can say a lot of complimentary things about these Carolina Hurricanes. And I will! They are relentless, squeezing the life out of their Eastern Conference opponents by outskating them to every puck and outworking them on every battle. They are rested, having gone 12-1 on their way to the Stanley Cup Final, with plenty of time between each round to let wounds heal. But one thing they are not, perhaps, is battle-tested. They have not struggled, have not stressed on the way to get here. Each time they have metaphorically punched an opponent in the mouth, that opponent has gone down and stayed down. The Golden Knights punched back on Tuesday, the clear aggressors in a wild Game 1 that saw Las Vegas emerge with the 5-4 victory. So many of Vegas's goals came off applying just a little bit of pressure to Carolina—nothing out of the ordinary for a good hockey team, but the sort of sustained and psychologically erosive checking that lesser teams just aren't capable of mustering for 60 minutes. And the Hurricanes, so poised up until this round, were repeatedly pestered into errors: turnovers, failed clears, lackadaisical backchecking. At inopportune times the Canes looked like ... well, like the teams the Canes have beaten. They'd better internalize quickly that this ain't Montreal. The Knights have a knack for poking and prodding pressure points, and it's on their targets not to flinch under it, because they're not going to let up, and they're not going to miss many opportunities to take advantage of lapses. It's those mistakes we made tonight that really [we] just don't make. And we made too many of those, said coach Rod Brind'Amour. They forced us into them and we didn't handle pressure particularly well.