With another sweep, Hurricanes show they're ready to level up in playoffs

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Walker put in 31 shifts as a defenseman a little more than 24 hours after his first shift as Quinn’s dad. Taylor, his wife, gave birth to their daughter on Friday. By the following afternoon, Walker had flown from Philadelphia to Raleigh, N.C., and back to Philadelphia, where the Hurricanes became the fifth team in NHL history and the first since the 1985 Edmonton Oilers to win their first eight postseason games, beating the Philadelphia Flyers in overtime, 3-2. Carolina could wait up to 10 days for the start of the Eastern Conference finals. It’s their third such trip in four seasons — and, for one of the era’s most consistently high-quality regular-season teams, it’s also their postseason high-water mark. They’re looking to change that, and are equipped to make it happen. Walker, though, has already leveled up. And he sounded happier than anyone about the break. “I didn’t want to get on the boys and tell them we better win tonight,” he said. “I’m really appreciative that everybody dug in, and the sweep’s huge for everybody, but to take this time to just be with my family is going to be really special.” On Thursday afternoon, Taylor had a doctor’s appointment. By that night, her water had broken. She called Walker, who was awake and lying in a hotel bed after the Hurricanes’ 4-1 win in Game 3. The first flight back to North Carolina wasn’t for another five hours, so the two stayed on FaceTime through the night and until he boarded the plane. By then, “things were kind of getting going,” Walker said. “I can’t put into words how proud I am of her. She had to go through it for a little bit without me there.” After the 90-minute flight, Walker headed for the hospital — and he made it in time. “I was there for everything,” he said. “The baby gods were on my side on that one and I got to experience it all.” On Saturday, after Walker arrived back in Philadelphia and “freshened up” at the team hotel, he and the rest of the Hurricanes accomplished something the league hadn’t seen in more than four decades. The Flyers dragged things into overtime, despite Carolina out-attempting them by 45, out-chancing them by 16 and holding an expected goal share of a staggering 74 percent. Eventually, as the Hurricanes so often do, they broke the dam. They came back from a pair of deficits, too. Until Game 2 against Philadelphia, all way through their four-game sweep of the Ottawa Senators, they’d faced zero. It started with a second period that put Carolina up 2-1, featuring goals from linemates Jackson Blake and Logan Stankoven. “We got to that in the second period and we didn’t really look back,” said Taylor Hall, who won a faceoff to start the sequence that led to Blake’s goal, directly set up Stankoven’s, and, a little more than five minutes into overtime, scooped up a mishandled clearing pass, streaked down the left wing and zipped a centering pass to Blake, who beat Dan Vladar to put Carolina through to the second round. There are many reasons to believe in Carolina, perhaps none larger than the play of the Hall-Stankoven-Blake line. Hall, the 2017-18 Hart Trophy winner, has aged into a been-there, done-that, all-zones multitool. Stankoven, at 5-foot-8 and still in his first season as an NHL center, leads the league with seven playoff goals. Blake is ferociously involved and highly productive, and just had himself a two-goal closeout game. With the top line of Sebastian Aho, Andrei Svechnikov and Seth Jarvis still in the starting blocks, as far as production goes, the second line has grabbed the baton and finished two legs of the race. As recently as last year, a series in which, say, Aho went without a goal would’ve ended the Hurricanes’ season. Guess how many he had against Philadelphia? Walker, by the way, plated 23 minutes and 10 seconds without missing a beat. He’s a high-end puck-carrier out of the defensive zone, and that part of his game was clearly unaffected, as Hall noted. Stankoven seemed baffled, while Jaccob Slavin attributed it to “dad strength.” All were impressed, and all were thrilled for Walker and his family. Another vibe from the Hurricanes, starting with coach Rod Brind’Amour and trickling on down, is that good as they’ve all been, they’re also still working toward their apex. That’s a fact that’s equal parts odd and true, given that Carolina has yet to drop a game in a postseason that began on April 18. There are too many odd-man breaks, Slavin said. Their first period didn’t feature the requisite amount of forechecking, Hall said. They’re relying too heavily on their penalty kill, plenty of them have said. And yet, they’re here, aiming higher and looking ahead, to the point that even their coach, a man without much of a reputation for compromise, is stressing the need to bask in it, if only for a day or two. “It’s a huge accomplishment,” Brind’Amour said. “This season is so long, and there’s that 82-game season we talk about that no one really gives much credit to. And yet this team has played well for eight months. It didn’t just get hot at the end. It’s been night in, night out like this. … And now, here we are. We gotta find a way to get that next step.” They could have more than a week to plot it out, but it’s starting to feel like the plan is already in place and being executed. Part of that entails following a script they wrote for the seven-day break that followed the Senators series. “Clearly,” Brind’Amour said, “that was OK.” They’re content to wait on the Buffalo Sabres or the Montreal Canadiens to emerge from the other Eastern Conference semifinal, which could last until May 18. The next level awaits. In the meantime, Quinn’s dad can try to squeeze in a few naps. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms