"That's the biggest thing that we noticed today on the video," Mark Recchi said yesterday after an off-ice session at Ristuccia Arena. "When we did win battles - there probably weren't a lot of them - we were careless with the puck after.
"We would just throw pucks at the net. We weren't patient with it. We didn't hold onto it. That's a big key to our game. We're big and strong and fast. Guys hold onto the puck and make it really hard for other teams. We cycle the puck well. We use our defensemen well.
"We weren't doing that at all. We haven't done that very well in the first two games."
In Game 1 of this second-round series, Carolina treated the puck as if it were tainted. In the second period, the Hurricanes couldn't clear it out of their zone, which allowed Phil Kessel to put a shot on net. Goalie Cam Ward kicked out Kessel's attempt and Milan Lucic's follow-up bid, but couldn't recover to stop Marc Savard on the doorstep.
Later in the period, during a standard breakout, forward Tuomo Ruutu flung a backhand cross-ice pass in the neutral zone that was intercepted by Michael Ryder. With momentum going toward the Carolina net, Ryder and Blake Wheeler broke away for an odd-man rush that resulted in Ryder's fifth goal of the postseason.
"That was the thing after Game 1 that we were shaking our heads with our game," said Carolina coach Paul Maurice. "We just hadn't done that in recent memory. That would be the most important thing."
During a video session after Game 1, one of the situations the Hurricanes studied - Maurice didn't want to show many - was the sequence before Boston's fourth goal. Lucic won a puck battle in center ice. As Lucic turned up ice, he was stripped by center Matt Cullen. An instant later, Savard picked Cullen's pocket to start the rush the other way, then scored Boston's final goal.
"It was almost comical," Maurice said. "On the fourth goal, we turned it over. They turned it back over. That wasn't good enough. We had to turn it over back again. It was easy to see where we needed to correct."
