Nine-Goal Hurricane: Carolina Repeats History in 9-2 Rout of Blackhawks

Some nights the goals just keep coming, and on Saturday night in Raleigh they came in a flood. The Carolina Hurricanes put nine past the Chicago Blackhawks in a 9-2 rout, scoring seven straight goals along the way, and in doing so they repeated a piece of their own history.

Nine goals in a game is rare enough that the Hurricanes have now done it only four times in franchise history. What makes this one remarkable is that it is the second time they have done it in the same calendar year — they also beat the Florida Panthers 9-1 back on January 16. Before that, you have to go back to 2009 for the other two: a 9-3 win over Tampa Bay on March 7, and a 9-0 shutout of the Islanders exactly a month later.

This was a team performance in the truest sense. Eight different Hurricanes finished the night with at least two points, and Sebastian Aho led the way with a goal and two assists. Andrei Svechnikov scored twice to take his season tally to nine, and Jordan Martinook added two of his own. There was no single hero, because there did not need to be one. Carolina kept coming in waves, and Chicago had no answer for any of them.

The numbers behind the win tell their own story. Pyotr Kochetkov, the man in the Carolina net, became only the 11th goaltender in NHL history to record 11 wins through his first 12 appearances of a season. He now sits at 11-1-0 with a 1.67 goals-against average, a .927 save percentage and two shutouts — the kind of start that turns a good team into a feared one. The Hurricanes improved to 14-3-2 and have now won two in a row.

For Chicago, it was another grim night in a season full of them. Connor Bedard did what he could, scoring one of the Blackhawks' two goals and setting up the other for his ninth assist of the season, but one player cannot hold back a tide. The defeat was Chicago's sixth in a row, dropping them to 4-13-2, and it extended a miserable pattern: the Blackhawks have now conceded at least four goals in every one of their 15 losses this season except one, a 3-2 defeat to Florida on October 25.

Carolina, meanwhile, look like a team building toward something. They have the goaltending, they have the depth — eight players with multiple points on one night says everything about that — and they have now put up nine goals twice in ten months. The rest of the league will have noticed. When the Hurricanes get rolling like this, there is not much anyone can do but wait for the storm to pass.