The goal was Aho's 13th of the season, tying him for the team lead. Aho has totaled eight points (5g, 3a) in his last six games.
"He's played well all year," Brind'Amour said. "He understands what he has to do as a leader on this team, and he's done that."
Minus: The first period
The Canes slogged their way through the first 20 minutes. As Jordan Martinook told Tripp Tracy in the first intermission interview, the team "wasn't even close to being good enough." Not totally unexpectedly, the Canes looked like a team that had travel nightmares two nights prior - because that's exactly what happened. The team's plane sat on the tarmac in Detroit for two hours while trying to outwait dense fog and zero visibility in Raleigh. The Canes were then re-routed to Greensboro, where they had to cobble together rooms in two hotels at 4 a.m. before busing to Raleigh six hours later. It's not meant to be an excuse; it's a rational explanation for why the team performed the way it did in the first period.
"Our first period was really bad, which I somewhat expected to happen, to be honest with you, just with the way our last couple of days have been," Brind'Amour said. "We kind of got going, and it was a pretty even game after that, but it's tough to play 40 minutes in the NHL and expect to win."
Not totally unexpected either was the Canes' response in the latter two periods of the game. The leadership in that room wasn't going to let a tough travel night and a plodding 20 minutes define an entire game.
"We didn't like our first period at all. We weren't skating hard enough. We just gave it to them too easily in the first period," Aho said. "We got back, and it's always nice to see the team dig in and come back. The first period was not good enough."
