Tweetmail No. 176: Chatter, Offense & Curling

Hello and welcome to Tweetmail, presented by our friends at
Tijuana Flats
! Wear your Canes gear to participating Raleigh locations on Wednesdays throughout the season and receive 50% off any entrée.
Tweetmail is a weekly feature on CarolinaHurricanes.com in which I take your Twitter questions about the Carolina Hurricanes or other assorted topics and answer them in mailbag form. Hopefully the final product is insightful to some degree, and maybe we have some fun along the way.
Let's get to it, and we'll begin with another email question!

I have a question about on-ice communication between players. What do they say to each other? - Amy
The chatter amongst teammates on the ice is pretty simple, short words or phrases that are designed to give direction in what is a fast-paced, frantic game.
Chip the puck up the boards, wheel around the net, heads up that an opponent is near, you've got time, I'm open. Most, if not all of these concepts can be translated in as much as a simple word - "Chip!" "Wheel!" "Heads!" "Time!" "Yep!" - or a stick tap or two. The more concise the direction, the better because you might only have a split-second to make a decision with the puck on your stick.
And then there's "chirping," when players attempt to get under their opponents' skin. Or when they want to let an official know that his call was, perhaps, subpar. If you want to get the uncensored version of these conversations, do a quick YouTube search for mic'd up clips. They usually don't disappoint.

Tweetmail is always a Wednesday feature, unless the odd vacation or holiday prevents me from being near a keyboard!
To answer your question, games like Tuesday happen throughout the course of a season. The Hurricanes won't score a touchdown and an extra point each and every night, but it's certainly encouraging to see the team score 14 goals over its last three games, especially after finding the back of the net just three times in the three games prior; scoring a goal per game won't land you many W's in this league, but three or four or seven goals is usually more than enough goal support.
So what's clicking now versus just a week ago?
"Our all-around game has improved. When that happens, more offense is going to come," said Jeff Skinner, who scored two goals in the 7-3 win over Los Angeles on Tuesday. "I think all-around in all areas we're playing better. I think that's showing up now on the scoresheet for us."
The Hurricanes will now play four straight games within their division and will need the offense to keep its foot on the pedal.
Tweet from @luvmy16rex: How long can/will the Canes go with 2 open roster spots?
(Disclaimer: This question arrived prior to the
Hurricanes' recall of Patrick Brown
late Tuesday night.)
… so, to answer your question, not long! Heading out on the road and then coming back to Raleigh for an intra-divisional back-to-back, the Hurricanes don't want to be shorthanded. They were already carrying an extra healthy defenseman, and now with the addition of Brown, the team also has an extra healthy forward. If a freak injury were to occur in practice or an illness strikes (hopefully neither happen), the Canes have extra bodies and won't have to scramble to fill a hole.

Producing a behind-the-scenes video series is constantly a discussion amongst our crew. "Open Ice" was an all-access series that took you behind the scenes of Prospects Development Camp in the summers of 2013 and 2014. The six-episode 2013 series can be seen
here
and the four-episode 2014 series (with a bonus clip) can be seen
here
. We also chronicled the
2014 dads trip
under the "Open Ice" umbrella.
While we've produced scattered behind-the-scenes content since, it hasn't carried consistent branding and has been more one-off rather than episodic. Recently, there has been increased chatter of resurrecting the episodic format for behind-the-scenes videos, and we got a taste of that with the below gameday film.

A good chunk of time and resources are necessary to do these types of things right. We want to do it right, and our hope is that you'll be seeing plenty more behind-the-scenes content in the near future.

Curling, for sure. Other than hockey, curling is definitely my favorite Winter Olympic sport to follow. I even got the chance to curl once when I was in college and it was a BLAST. My delivery form left a lot to be desired, but I felt like my sweeping was decent, at least for my first go.
If you're interested, there's a club nearby! The

, which has a dedicated curling facility in Durham, hosts all sorts of events, including learn to curl sessions. It's really fun!
We posed this same Tweetmail question to players in the locker room. Check out what they had to say.

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Join me next week for more questions and more answers!
If you have a question you'd like answered or you want to organize a curling outing, you can find me on Twitter at
@MSmithCanes
or drop an email
here
.