Bouncing Back
The message was clear following the Hurricanes' 4-1 loss on Saturday: Flush it and move on, because there wasn't much to savor in that momentum-stalling defeat.
"It wasn't there today. We weren't ready to show up," Lucas Wallmark said. "We win together, and we lose together. … We have to be better than that."
"We just didn't come ready to go from the get-go. We knew what they were going to do. We talked about it and had a game plan, but from the first shift on, we didn't do it at all," head coach Rod Brind'Amour said after the game. "It's a tough one because we wanted to keep moving forward, but, man, I've never seen us play that bad. That was really poor, to a man. Each guy - we didn't come ready to go, and we got what we deserved."
The effort really hasn't been a question all season. A bounce-back game in Montreal could help transform Saturday night's loss to a simple blip on the radar.
"That was not our best effort the other night, and everyone knows that," Brind'Amour said after practice on Monday. "It's easy to get that point across. That's not good enough to win in this league."
Bean to Make Debut
Defenseman Jake Bean will dress in his first NHL game on Tuesday night in Montreal. With Haydn Fleury sidelined with a concussion, the call came to Bean, who has 11 points (3g, 8a) in 21 games with the Charlotte Checkers in his first professional season.
