Source :- PERTH NOW NEWS
The Carolina Hurricanes opened ice hockey’s NHL playoffs with a shutout and just kept smothering opponents, swarming in absolute refusal to yield time or space to puck handlers.
The Vegas Golden Knights simply got better with each round until locking up the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Colorado Avalanche in a shocking sweep of a team that romped through the regular season.
Now they turn their lockdown sights on each other for the chance to hoist the most prestigious prize in the sport, the Stanley Cup.
“It’s the Stanley Cup Final, it’s going to be a defence-first game,” Vegas defenceman Dylan Coghlan said.
“If you don’t have that mentality, then it’s not going to go in your favour.”
The best-of-seven series, which opens on Wednesday AEST at Carolina, pairs an Eastern Conference champion that finished second in the regular season behind Colorado, against a Western Conference champion that elevated their game the longer the playoffs wore on.
Both teams have offence, such as Vegas’s Mitch Marner scoring on a between-the-legs breakaway goal against Anaheim, or the net-finding heat coming off Carolina’s Logan Stankoven-centred second line.
But these are teams that take just as much joy in grinding opposing offences into the ice.
Vegas have allowed just 10 goals in their past six games as they chase a second championship in four seasons. The Hurricanes have given up two or fewer goals in 12 of 13 playoff games and are back in the final for the first time since winning it in 2006.
“I think we’re just kind of all on the same page right now,” Hurricanes defenceman Sean Walker said. “It’s a team effort to be so solid defensively. We’re definitely aggressive, but it’s full five-man effort.”
The Golden Knights took off after the late-season firing of Bruce Cassidy to hire John Tortorella as coach, but there were also March trade moves to add forwards Cole Smith and Nic Dowd to bolster the fourth line by getting bigger and stronger while also helping the penalty kill.
They battled through six-game series against both Utah and Anaheim before taking on the Avs, led by high-end skill in Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar and Martin Necas.
The Golden Knights gave up nothing easy and never let the high-flying Avs find a sweet-skating groove. The Avs managed just seven goals in four games.
The Hurricanes are 12-1 in the playoffs, sweeping both Ottawa and Philadelphia while allowing just five goals in each of those two rounds.
Then came a 6-2 loss to Montreal in Game 1 of the East final, a result that in hindsight turned out to be a blip for a team coming off the longest between-rounds playoff break in more than a century.
After heavy video review, Carolina responded by allowing five goals in the four consecutive wins that followed — the last two coming by a 10-1 combined score.
