Carolina coughed up a 4-2 cushion and then a late 5-4 one to Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl in Edmonton. The real issue is the shootout order Rod Brind'Amour ran out, and he still hasn't explained it.
By the time Carolina needed shooters, Brind'Amour had four forwards on his bench who had already beaten Devon Levi clean that night. Seth Jarvis scored in his first game back from shoulder surgery. Sebastian Aho buried a breakaway. Jackson Blake tied it on the power play. Logan Stankoven found the net too. Those are the guys who, minutes earlier, proved they could solve this goalie under real pressure.
Brind'Amour sent out Shayne Gostisbehere first. Gostisbehere is a defenseman who didn't score a goal in the game; his night's work was two assists. Then came Andrei Svechnikov, who was held off the scoresheet entirely and managed a single shot on goal across nearly nineteen minutes of ice time. Both missed. Jarvis, at least, got a turn, but only third, and he missed too, right before Ryan Nugent-Hopkins buried the winner for Edmonton in the third round. Aho, Blake and Stankoven never got off the bench at all.
RatingSomeone decided that order, wrote it down and handed it over. That someone is the head coach.
Brind'Amour talked afterward, just not about that. He owned the penalties, grumbling that his team took five to Edmonton's two and that the fluky deflection which forced overtime "should never go in." That's accountability for the parts of the night that were partly out of his hands. On the one call that was entirely his, who shoots and in what order, he's said nothing. No explanation for why a goalless defenseman and his quietest forward went ahead of the four guys who'd just lit up Levi.
I don't buy a matchup explanation either. This was a shootout against a goalie Carolina's own players had already beaten with straightforward stuff. You run those guys back out and you make Levi stop them twice. You don't gamble the extra point on hunches while your hot hands stand around.
A single point on the road against one of the best teams in the league, in a wide-open game Edmonton's two superstars dragged back twice, is a perfectly respectable haul. Carolina sat at 8-2-2 after this one, deep into a road trip that wraps up at St. Louis. Nobody will remember one October shootout by the spring.
But the point Carolina left on the table was gettable, and it was left there by a choice. Until Brind'Amour says why Gostisbehere and Svechnikov went before the four men who'd already scored, the two points belong on his ledger.
