The Carolina Hurricanes are an enigma, as they have always been, and as they will forever be. Since Jordan Staal joined his brother Eric on this team in 2011, the Canes have dominated puck possession and shot totals with ease. Something about the Hurricanes’ system or core personnel has rendered them a puck control juggernaut comparable to the Bergeron-era Bruins and the Doughty-era Kings.

But unlike those two clubs, Carolina has found no playoff success in recent years. Instead, the Hurricanes are consistently a mediocre Eastern-Conference team with omnipresent breakout potential. When the Canes control play, they never seem to find a pivotal finish. When they eventually give up chances, their goaltender lets in goals. With most teams who fall victim to bad “puck luck” in this fashion, statisticians expect regression year over year. If a team controls the puck, the wins eventually come rolling in as the sample size over which they continue to do so increases. In a worst-case scenario, they can switch goaltenders to try to bolster their Team Save Percentage. But teams find a way to win if their core is skilled enough to out-possess their opponents.

Yet, somehow, terrible puck luck has followed Carolina across multiple seasons and three starting goaltenders. Every year they rank among the league’s best teams by shots and Corsi, but they lose low-scoring games and miss the playoffs anyway, and then they come back in September looking like a prospective dark horse once more. Apparently, nobody can explain why this keeps happening.

It is true that this year feels different. Martin Necas and Andrei Svechnikov have arrived, and by all accounts, they look legit. The addition of Dougie Hamilton turns a top-tier blue line into perhaps the second-best group in the league. They’re doing weird shit with the paint in the PNC Arena locker rooms, and Rod Brind’Amour is making players practice Grit. I actually believe that the 2018-19 Hurricanes will be a new team, and it should be exciting.

But Carolina didn’t actually do anything to answer the questions that haunted them throughout last season. A team that possesses the puck but still loses games is doing so for one of three reasons:

They aren’t scoring on a high percentage of their shots. They aren’t stopping enough of the shots they do concede. They’re losing the special teams battle so badly that it renders their 5-on-5 possession advantage meaningless.

In the case of the Hurricanes, the stats quickly reject the third possibility. At 5 on 5, he Canes posted Corsi- and Shots-For rates of 54.48 and 52.89, but a Goals For rate of only 46.41%, indicating that their problems stem from even strength issues. Moreover, they were shorthanded an average number of times last season and had a bad-but-not-terrible penalty kill, both of which suggest that they weren’t just getting buried by opposing power plays.

The numbers prove that the Hurricanes’ issues last season, as they have been for years, were in the blue paint at each end of the rink. Carolina scored on 7.03% of their shots, the fourth-worst rate in the league. They had a team save percentage of 90.88, which ranked behind only the Ottawa Senators. The Hurricanes might have upgraded in net by replacing aging backup Cam Ward with higher-upside backup Petr Mrazek, but they still don’t have what they need. Scott Darling, frankly, has never proven that he’s an NHL starter.

Plus, after struggling to score last year, the Canes dealt their second-and third-best forwards during the offseason and replaced them internally with worse and unproven players. In his last three seasons, Skinner has notched 99 goals on 816 shots – that’s a 33-goal average and a 12.1% shooting rate on teams that lacked any other shooters. Svech and Necas are the real deal, and Zykov, Kuokkanen, and Gauthier might have serious upside, but it’s fair to doubt that the Hurricanes can even replace Skinner on the front end, let alone both Skinner and Lindholm. Couple this concern with the big question mark in goal, and the pieces are in place for another disappointing season.

I fully understand that this Carolina core will be a bona fide contender in the seasons to come. They know how to control the puck. The blue line is elite already and very young, and the forward prospects are getting ready to impact the NHL. But unfortunately, the Metropolitan Division is incredibly deep this year, and the Hurricanes’ roster today makes it look as though their playoff drought will continue.