Offensive outpour sees Canes past Flyers

The Carolina Hurricanes finished off the six-game road trip the best way they could as they smashed the Philadelphia Flyers with a six-goal offensive explosion.

The Canes had been playing the right way, working hard and generating chances, the past two games, but had come up mostly empty-handed to show for it. They would not be denied a third time however.

But it wasn’t so smooth sailing to begin with.

Just 50 seconds into the game, the Flyers had opened up the scoring as Claude Giroux sent a perfect no-look pass through the crease to Ivan Provorov on the other side for the slam dunk.

The Hurricanes had challenged the goal for goaltender interference as Sean Couturier had made contact with Antti Raanta in the crease, but the contact wasn’t enough to overturn the goal.

The Canes killed the delay of game penalty and started to build their game from there.

Eventually the work paid off.

With 6:20 left in the first, Sebastian Aho sniped a puck past Carter Hart to tie the game. It was a strong effort by Teuvo Teravainen on the puck retrieval and the eventual set up for the shot, further enforcing the idea that those two should always be playing together.

The period looked like the Canes shook off the early rust and were going to be poised to take the lead, with a 17-6 advantage in shots after 20, but late in the first, disaster struck.

The Hurricanes’ power play — which hasn’t scored in five games — managed to get even worse as Joel Farabee took it up the ice, undressed Seth Jarvis and beat Raanta cleanly for a shorthanded goal.

So despite another strong period, the Canes just didn’t come out ahead and it was looking like another one of those games.

But then bedlam broke loose in the second.

Let’s break it down by timestamps:

19:37: To kick off the period, it was Aho with his second of the night as he rifled one past Hart after a solo entry.

18:44: Then the Flyers took the lead back after Rasmus Ristolainen bombed one past Raanta despite no traffic in front.

18:15: Jesper Fast. Hounding in front. Tie game.

14:12: The Canes take their first lead of the evening on a beautiful sequence. Jesperi Kotkaniemi enters the zone, leaves it off for Andrei Svechnikov, who drops it to Tony DeAngelo, who laces it cross-ice to Seth Jarvis, who one touches it to the front of the net where Kotkanimei is to tap it home. And breath.

It was like an episode of Oprah.

“You get a goal!”

“You get a goal!”

“Everybody gets a goal!”

And while not in the same flurry of action, Steven Lorentz decided to join in on the fun late into the period. After yet another tremendous pass from DeAngelo found him in all alone, Lorentz waited just long enough to get Hart moving and sent it right past him.

While the rest of the team was living on the high of a four goal period, Raanta had to be the one to make sure the lead stayed two heading into intermission, making a dynamite save soon after the Canes’ fifth goal.

And as the Canes were shutting it down in the third period, Svechnikov just had to make sure that the game was well and truly finished, snapping an 11-game goal drought with a far-side shot.

The Canes cruised from there and end the road trip with a 4-1-1 record — good for 9 out of a potential 12 points.

The Hurricanes will finally return home for another game at PNC Arena as they take on the Washington Capitals for a top-of-the-division showdown Saturday afternoon at 1 p.m.