Associated Press
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Andrei Svechnikov spent the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs looking like the player the Carolina Hurricanes desperately need him to be.
The 25-year-old Russian forward had five goals in the first-round series win against the New Jersey Devils, the last in Tuesday’s 5-4 comeback win in two overtimes to move on in five games. He was a constant presence with his aggressiveness, both in pushing the puck into attacking areas and working to get under the skin of Devils goalie Jacob Markstrom.
Now the Hurricanes are advancing, and the 6-foot-3, 199-pound Svechnikov is tied for the NHL lead in postseason goals so far.
“Yeah, obviously I had a good series,” Svechnikov said after Tuesday’s win. “But I feel like right now, kind of move on and it’s going to be a new series.”
Svechnikov, the No. 2 overall pick in the 2018 draft, was a rookie as Carolina opened what has now become a seven-year streak of not only reaching the playoffs, but winning a postseason series. He scored 30 goals in 2021-22 and was on his way to potentially doing it again the next year when he went down with a season-ending knee injury and missed Carolina’s trip to the 2023 Eastern Conference Final.
He hasn’t scored more than 20 goals in either of his two full seasons back from that injury. But he’s rolling now at the perfect time, including a hat trick in a Game 4 road win that was marked by neighbors throwing their hats into the front yard of Svechnikov’s Raleigh home to mark the occasion.
This is the first time Svechnikov has reached five goals in a single postseason, and he did it in five games.
“I don’t want to say we forgot what it was like,” coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “He went through a stretch there where it was like ‘Eh’ and the now it’s like, ‘There it is, that’s the guy that we all love.’
“I don’t know what he ended up with tonight but it felt like he was firing pucks. And every shift he was out there, it was like, ‘OK, they’re going to get one.'”
Svechnikov finished with nine shots on goal, the most of his career in any NHL game.
“Nine? OK,” Brind’Amour said. “That’s a good number.”
It’s a good sign of his activity level in putting the puck into scoring chances. Svechnikov was averaging 3.2 shots on goal per game for the 2021-22 and 2022-23 regular seasons leading up to his knee injury, but had been at 2.4 for last season and 2.5 this season, according to Sportradar.
In the New Jersey series, he was at five or better in three of the five games and tallied 15 in the last two.
To listen to Brind’Amour, Svechnikov was also the only player rolling early in what was otherwise a debacle of a first period Tuesday as Carolina fell behind 3-0 in the first 10 minutes.
“In the first period, the puck would bounce over our stick or something happening, it just wasn’t our game,” Svechnikov said. “We kind of had the intermission and said, ‘Let’s be calm, let’s play our game.’ And we came out hard and scored right away, three goals, which was nice.”
Svechnikov provided Carolina’s first tying goal, taking a feed from Dmitry Orlov beyond the left faceoff circle and skating in to pop the puck past Markstrom to make it 3-3 at the 5:40 mark of the second period.
He also seemed to aggravate Markstrom at times during the series, at one point prompting Markstrom to take a whack at Svechnikov near the top of the crease only to inadvertently hit teammate Cody Glass and send him to the tunnel in pain during Game 1.
The Hurricanes need all of that from Svechnikov, both as a physical presence on the forecheck and around the net as a scoring threat.
“Listen, we love the kid, everybody does,” Brind’Amour said. “I think he had for him a year that was maybe not great. But this is a time that really counts. … He’s a kid that cares about winning and he cares about contributing. He’s clearly doing that.”
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AP NHL playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/NHL
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