SUNRISE, Fla. — It’s early in Game 3 when Dmitry Orlov makes a play that will define his night, and, in many ways, this series for his Carolina Hurricanes.
With Matthew Tkachuk bearing down on him and threatening to punish him once more on the forecheck, Orlov bails, leaving the puck to Tkachuk and a glorious scoring chance to the Florida Panthers.
They may not have capitalized on it in the moment, but they did in the end.
It was an act of submission from Orlov. The product of attrition, intimidation and pain inflicted by the Panthers through the first two games of this series and a sign the players on Florida’s bench surely picked up before they beat the Hurricanes 6-2 to open up a 3-0 series lead and put themselves one win from a third straight appearance in the Stanley Cup Final.
“The feeling on the bench for us seeing that is you have to invest in (doing damage to) the other defence corps,” said Nate Schmidt. “It’s not just in a game, but in Game 1, in Game 2, so it starts to accumulate by Game 3. Some compound interest over time, for all you investing folk out there.”
It pays dividends.
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This is what playoff hockey is about, and arguably no one plays it better than the Panthers. They’re smash-and-grab specialists, imposing their will and breaking that of their opponents, feeding off vulnerability as soon as they sense it.
Ask Orlov, who could later be seen smashing his stick to smithereens after giving another puck to Tkachuk and getting caught on the ice for yet another Panthers goal.
It was Aleksander Barkov’s first of two in the game, Florida’s fourth, and it left Orlov minus-4 on the night.
His early bailout didn’t cost the Hurricanes a goal, but it signalled vulnerability.
The seeds of it were planted well before Saturday’s game.
“We have a really good forecheck,” said Brad Marchand, who scored Florida’s sixth and final goal of Game 3. “We come hard, and this team has played that way for a while now, so they read off each other and they kind of know where to go to get pucks back and support each other. That’s what you’re looking for is to get pucks back and you get a turnover because you get a stick on it or you get a guy who gets out of the way. All leads to the same result — you getting it back and hopefully creating a play.”
It also leads to intimidation, which always has been — and always will be — a feature of winning hockey at this time of year.
Standing up to it becomes harder and harder to do.
“Sometimes, the amount of speed somebody’s coming in at,” said Marchand, “there’s a level of self-preservation in the game, too.”
Down 2-0 in the series, early into Game 3 might not be the time, though.
Even up 2-0, the situation calls for embracing pain, because that’s another feature of winning hockey.
“I felt me and (Dmitry Kulikov) Kuli just mucked it out all night,” said Schmidt. “That was all of my shifts the whole night — snap it, get hit, snap it, get hit, get it out of the zone. If you just accept your night’s going to go that way, you get the job done.
“But if you’re hoping to get up the ice and make plays, it becomes harder to accept.”
It’s the same thing on offence.
How many Hurricanes forwards have shown a willingness to get their noses dirty enough to prevail on the scoresheet?
Logan Stankoven was one in this game, netting a goal to make it 1-1 and bring his team into the fight.
Jordan Staal and Jordan Martinook are always in it, but they aren’t the guys expected to score the goals for this Carolina team.
“There’s a couple of guys in there that I don’t think came to play the way they needed to in this time of year,” said Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour. “It can’t be Jordan Staal and Martinook being our best players. That can’t always be that way, and they are every night. We needed more out of some guys.”
Seth Jarvis was only particularly noticeable in this game when he scored Carolina’s second goal with a little more than 10 minutes remaining. Top centre Sebastian Aho’s feature play was a holding penalty in the final minute of the second period.
Andrei Svechnikov topped him with slashing, roughing and misconduct penalties in a tussle with Sam Bennett with just under five minutes to play.
It was one of many sequences in which the player, who came into this series with eight goals in the playoffs, looked overwhelmed.
From a pair with Andrei Nikishin, who was playing his second-ever NHL game, it was 33-year-old Orlov who looked like a rookie. And that one early-game sequence from him was emblematic of the Hurricanes as a whole in this series.
Meanwhile, the Panthers came into Game 3 down Sam Reinhart — their best goal scorer, one of the best power-play players, arguably their best penalty killer — and got a huge goal from the player who replaced him, Jesper Boqvist.
There was no one to replace Eetu Luostarinen, who was ejected from the game after taking a five-minute major for boarding Jackson Blake in the 17th minute of play.
Still, the Panthers killed off that penalty and committed to the simple, hard and sometimes painful acts that would later enable them to break a 1-1 tie — and the game wide open. And they didn’t stop doing it.
Ask Niko Mikkola, whose second goal of the game helped put it out of reach. He still came charging back to erase a late Stankoven chance that sent him careening into the boards and then wobbling to Florida’s room in pain.
“We think he’s going to be OK,” said Panthers coach Paul Maurice.
We can safely assume if Mikkola returns to play Game 4, he won’t hesitate to take hits to make plays.
Should we expect the Hurricanes to adjust Monday?
If they don’t, it’ll be a 16th straight loss in the Conference Final, dating back to 2009, and an eighth consecutive one to the Panthers in it since 2023.
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