Welcome to Playoff Hockey, Canes Country Style

It’s been ten long years, but here we are: three days away from the start of an actual, honest to God Stanley Cup Playoff series involving the Carolina Hurricanes. We’ve been making plans for this for a couple of weeks, jinxes be damned, and I think you’re really going to like what we have in store for the Hurricanes’ postseason run here at Canes Country.

Of course, you can expect the usual news and analysis that you’ve come to expect from us on a daily basis. We will be traveling with the team (well, not literally on the team charter; the Official CC Automobile will be racking up the miles) to as many away games as we can get to, so expect expanded coverage on the road as well. Of course, we’ll also have the usual features you’ve come to expect, plus bonus behind-the-scenes content on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. (Expect a Facebook Live or two at some point, too!)

All of this coverage is coming out of our own pockets, so that’s why you’ve seen us ask if there would be any interested parties willing to sponsor our coverage. We’ll give you shoutouts on each of our stories, and you’ll be reaching an audience that continues to grow. (More on that in a minute.) If you’re interested, or know someone who might be, shoot us an email at sbncanescountry at gmail dot com.

Finally, we owe you a debt of gratitude for helping us break readership record after record this season. We’ve been setting traffic records nearly daily for most of the past two months. Our site traffic is up more than 30% year over year, and we are regularly knocking on the door of the top ten of SBN hockey sites every day. Considering just a couple years ago we were happy to be in the top 20, that’s an astounding achievement.

We know you value our coverage (at least, we’re assuming you aren’t just hate-reading, and if you are, thanks for the traffic!) and our pledge to you during the postseason is that we will be just as committed, if not moreso, than we’ve been all season. The Canes aren’t done, and neither are we. From all of us, thank you for making CC a destination for Canes coverage. It’s gratifying to know our hard work is as appreciated and valued as it is.

Now...let’s go enjoy some playoff hockey!

A Note From The Community Manager

We’re expecting a lot of newcomers to our little corner of the hockey world over the next few weeks, so now is a good time for a reminder about our Community Guidelines and our expectations for all who participate in our community.

If you’re new here, welcome! Whether you’ve been a fan for 20 minutes or 20 years, we want your experience here to be a welcoming one. If you’ve been around here a while, you folks are awesome (!!!) and we appreciate your experiences, opinions, ideas and humor that enliven our discussions and keep this site a vibrant place.

With that said, we want to remind everyone of our core policies and also make note of how that might change slightly now that we’re in playoff mode. Our regulars are used to most of this, but it’s not a bad idea to look it over again just to make sure everyone’s on the same sheet of ice.

Getting Started

• You can find the SB Nation Community Guidelines and Canes Country Community Guidelines in our Library section under the site navigation bar. Please read over them now as a refresher and refer to them often if you have questions about what is appropriate behavior while participating at our site.
• Take a moment to verify your account information including your name and email address. It’s a requirement for participating in the SB Nation network, and we use the information for communicating directly with you when needed.
• If you have never signed up as a member but are thinking about it, it takes two days to activate your account once you register. So if you want to talk about Thursday’s game, now is the time to sign up. Even if you don’t plan to comment, if you sign on with a member ID, it’s easier to view new comments versus those you’ve already read if you’re signed on to the site.
• Please do NOT create multiple accounts on our site, for any reason. It’s a flagrant violation of SB Nation’s policies and will be strictly enforced. If you have an issue with your account and need help, email us at sbncanescountry@gmail.com and we will help you with a resolution.

About Our Moderating Tools

• Folks, we don’t have a ton of fancy tools at our disposal to moderate comments here. We can delete comments that don’t comply with our guidelines, we can send messages to members, we can issue warnings or suspensions/bans, and that’s about it.
• If a comment is deleted, all the trailing replies to that comment are also deleted. There’s no way around it. So you may find yourself in a situation where one of your comments was deleted for the sole reason that the comment you replied to was deleted. Rest assured you probably did nothing wrong (if you did we will let you know), it’s just an unfortunate consequence of our infrastructure.
• If you have a question regarding site moderation, ask via email to our site email account, sbncanescountry@gmail.com. We don’t discuss moderation actions publicly and this is also strictly enforced.

Our Expectations As We Embark On Our Playoff Journey

• To sum up our guiding principles in three words: Follow Wheaton’s Law.
• You don’t have to be a Canes fan to join our discussion, but you must remember that this site exists specifically for fans of the Canes. We expect to be especially strict with consequences for comments that are not in support of our site’s purpose. So if you’re thinking about informing us that our attendance sucks or our storm surge is stupid or the team should relocate to a market that cares about hockey, don’t waste the electrons.
• And while we’re at it, we trust that our regulars will extend that same courtesy to our opponents and new members.
• Please keep in mind that not all of our members speak English as a first language, nor does everyone catch ‘Staal’ being autocorrected to ‘Stall’ before a comment posts from their phone. Perfect grammar or spelling is not a requirement for commenting here.
• Be supportive to people who are new to hockey or new to the Hurricanes, because you were once in their shoes, and this fan base deserves to be built up, not torn down. There is no place for gatekeeping or fan policing on this site.
• Profanity isn’t prohibited but this is a PG-13 site, so keep the profanity to a reasonable level (and avoid using profane terms as imperative verbs).

Holy crap, y’all, we’re in the PLAYOFFS! Let’s all be excellent to each other, and enjoy the ride. Can’t wait to get this party started.