RALEIGH — Sometimes, you just need a bounce.
The Hurricanes got a couple of them on Thursday.
Boston defenseman Nikita Zadorov’s clearing attempt in the final minute of regulation was foiled by a broken stick, allowing Hurricanes right wing Seth Jarvis to grab the puck and fire it past Jones Korpisalo with 18.6 remaining to break a tie and give Carolina a 3-2 win at Lenovo Center.
“I (saw) the stick break, and it was just a matter of getting the puck,” Jarvis said. “Confidence lately shooting the puck hasn’t been very high. I’ve had a lot of chances, haven’t scored. So it’s nice to see one drop.”
The goal came just after the Hurricanes had seemingly taken the lead on a Taylor Hall goal only to see it overturned on review for offside.
But Carolina, seemingly weighed down by the furor surrounding Mikko Rantanen and Friday’s pending trade deadline, got the (literal) break they needed to get two points.
“There’s been a lot of games where we thought we played a lot better and haven’t got the win,” Jarvis added. “So it’s nice. It kind of repaid us. But we know we have to play a lot better. That’s not going to happen very often at all.”
It wasn’t the only bounce that benefited the home team. Carolina took a 2-1 lead early in the second period when Brent Burns, three days shy of his 40th birthday, jumped off the bench, got the puck and skated deep into the right circle.
He aimed a centering pass toward Hall that instead hit Tyler Wotherspoon’s stick, and the puck deflected in to reestablish Carolina’s lead at 2:06 of the middle frame.
“He’s had some of those that just haven’t gone in,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said of Burns’ fifth goal of the year, “but we got a break tonight, right?”
The Hurricanes didn’t get much from their moribund power play, which went 0 for 3 and has scored just four times in the last 26 games. Brind’Amour again shuffled his units, adding Jackson Blake to the top group, but Brind’Amour gave a blunt “no, definitely not” when asked if he had seen any improvement.
Carolina, however, did get another goal shorthanded to open the scoring.
With Rantanen in the box for an offensive zone hook, Sebastian Aho knocked the puck off Bruins defenseman Mason Lohrei’s stick and beat David Pastrnak to the loose puck along the boards.
Aho then darted across the front of the Boston net, waited out Korpisalo and lifted a backhand into the net for his third shorthanded goal of the season and a 1-0 at 6:29 of the first.
“Such a sharp angle, so I kind of didn’t have much else,” Aho said of waiting out Korpisalo. “Kind of lucky how I had so much space to pull it, and good thing I had patience this time to put that one in.”
Brind’Amour said the team needed plays like Aho’s to overcome the team’s overall malaise.
“You need games where we just don’t have it, we need some individual efforts,” he said. “(Aho) on the first one, that’s just 100% individual effort. And then I would say (Pyotr Kochetkov) all night, really, was the difference.
Kochetkov earned his third straight win, making 32 stops and keeping Boston at bay.
The Bruins did dent Kochetkov twice, both by former Hurricanes draft pick Morgan Geekie to tie the game.
Down 1-0 with 65 seconds left in the first period, Boston knotted the score. Kochetkov made a save on Pavel Zacha, but Geekie buried the rebound for his 21st goal and a tie.
Geekie then tied the game again early in the third, crashing the net to locate a bouncing puck and scoring at 1:14 of the third.
But Carolina — with help from a broken stick — found a way to earn two points and now just needs to get past the 3 p.m. trade deadline and exhale.
“It’s tough. I wish I could say it isn’t,” Jarvis said. “It’s hard on everybody. But we’ve got, what, 24 hours until all this is done? And I think that’s what a lot of people are waiting for is just for the noise to be gone and we can really focus on ourselves. But yeah, it’s part of the job and it’s part of being a professional, but it is tough.”
Notes: Dmitry Orlov was a late scratch with an injury and was replaced by Riley Stillman, but Stillman played just 18 seconds and left the game after suffering a skate cut to the face and missing the rest of the game. … Boston defenseman Andrew Peek had two assists.
