Six weeks in, a work in progress

Six weeks into Paul Maurice’s tenure in charge of the Carolina Hurricanes, it’s clear that he’s made some progress — but not nearly enough.

Maurice changed some of what the Hurricanes try to do defensively, but the main principles he has preached aren’t dramatically different from what Peter Laviolette couldn’t convince the Hurricanes to embrace.

Those include: Stop and start more, which requires working harder and making fewer slow, looping turns; get pucks to the net; and keep a “third man high” in the offensive zone, a forward in a defensive posture on offense to prevent against odd-man rushes.

“Which we were trying to do before,” Hurricanes forward Eric Staal said. “He’s just harped on it more.”

Now that the Canes have followed a four-game winning streak with a four-game losing streak, the results are decidedly mixed. (The Canes are 9-8-3.)

The Canes oddly resemble the two aging, underperforming Leafs teams Maurice coached, neither of which made the playoffs. The Maple Leafs’ second, third and fourth goals Thursday on their way to a 4-0 lead were embarrassingly easy under any circumstances, let alone a must-win game.

A Matt Cullen goal late in the second and an intermission talk from Maurice that blistered the paint in the dressing room provoked a wild rally in the third that saw the Canes score three more goals, not including a disallowed apparent goal, to tie the score 4-4.

Then Tim Gleason got his stick up behind the net — “It was my stupid penalty and it cost us the game,” Gleason said — Tomas Kaberle scored on the power play and Jason Blake finished his hat trick with an empty-net goal.

“We played well enough to win? No,” Maurice said. “We played well in stretches and then we were horse(bleep) in the second period.”

The rare live-television expletive, from a media-savvy coach who normally exerts the most intricate degree of control over his public facade, may be a window into the depths of his frustration that the forward momentum he saw disappeared so quickly.

As the rush of adrenaline and shame that followed the coaching change fades, the Hurricanes are falling into their old habits and cutting any number of corners they’re not talented enough to cut — although Maurice postulated that perhaps the Canes still think they are.

“For whatever reason, we’ve got to make 12 passes before we shoot the puck,” Maurice said. “I used to firmly believe that was a lack of confidence in shooting the puck, but maybe there’s some arrogance in there too, that this should somehow be easy. Unfortunately, we’ve got an All-Star break coming up, but we will squeeze some of that arrogance out of them and get back to a basic game of hockey.”

Sounds like a logical next step, but Thursday showed how deep the problems with this team run. Some of them may be beyond Maurice's grasp, unless he can hop over the boards and score 30 goals while pumping $4 million into the payroll.

Barring that, the only grade to give Maurice at this early stage is incomplete. Now that the Canes are facing real adversity — and if they slip off the pace here, at the same point they slipped off the pace last season, almost to the day, there may be no way back — his job is just beginning.

UPDATE: Tim Gleason had a little more to say Thursday night than Javier Serna had space for in his game story. As is usually the case when Gleason speaks out, it's worth reading.

“It was pretty much a piss-poor effort in the first and second periods. We weren’t ready to play. I think we were just thinking too much all over the ice. We found the urgency in the third period, we came back, and it was my stupid penalty and it cost us the game.

"I know we fought hard. We fought hard in the third period down 4-1. We’ve got to keep positive here. It’s the only way we’re going to be successful and we’ve got to forget about it. Everybody knows we’ve lost four in a row. You look forward to Saturday’s game and try to get the two points and go from there.”

“It’s pretty bad that we have to turn it around for 12 minutes. I’ve said it enough. We have the character, the guys, the talent, the hard work, a good work ethic down here. We have to find a way — put it this way, we do too much talking. We might as well start acting on the ice and doing our jobs again. Everybody has their own job to do at the end of the night. We have to look into the mirror and know that you have a job to do. We have to find a way to do it consistently. That starts with me and it goes from me on up.”