Unfamiliar territory for the Carolina Hurricanes. We're a third away through the season 27 games, 81 pretty much a third and the last three seasons when we got to the one third mark of the season, Carolina was in first place in their division looking very much like a team that was headed for a deep playoff run. They don't look anything like that right now. A they're not in first place, they're not even close to it. They're 10th in the east right now based on points percentage. They are 10th in the east. Top eight teams make the playoffs. Carolina, not even in the top eight right now and there's a lot of reasons for it. A right now we're talking about a team that is on a four game losing streak all against good teams in the Western conference, all in Canada and they're not done yet with this road trip. It'll be the second six game roadie of the season. They're in Ottawa, Tuesday and then Detroit on Thursday, Detroit is one of the better teams in the Eastern conference and Ottawa is a team that just thumped Detroit in Detroit 5 to 1 last night, but there's a lot of reasons why Carolina is where they are. Their stars have not been great in some cases, their stars have not been good. Sebastian Aho Tavo Teran and Seth Jarvis, three of their best offensive players have taken a zero on this road trip. No points zero for four can't happen. Especially for a team that is struggling to find consistency. Your best players have to be that on a nightly basis hasn't happened. Andrei Veni missed the first eight games of the season with an injury. He missed another game with an illness. He's missed the last two with an upper body injury. Maybe it was something that happened earlier on the road trip. Not sure. Anyway, the problem is that without Andre it just thins out their dynamic players just a little bit and then you throw in the fact that some of their players just aren't playing well at all on both ends of the rink. Martin Naches has struggled with defensive assignments and it was glaring in the loss in Vancouver two huge mistakes that he's made cost them goals. Michael Bunting hasn't been much better defensively. It cost them against Calgary. It cost them also against Vancouver. Bottom line for me is that they are playing like a team that doesn't necessarily believe in itself right now. Part of that stems from the goal mouth out Carolina after five years of the Rod Brinda Moore era doing no worse. Than league average goaltending. No worse has the worst goaltending in the league by a healthy margin by any measure at all. You look at it. Carolina's goaltending is 32nd best in the NHL. If that doesn't improve, we're not going to have to worry about the playoffs. The only way to improve it is through a trade. We'll see what happens with the front office. But to me, you have to fix the goaltending. The other things will take care of themselves, but they're playing like a team that doesn't necessarily believe in what's behind them and you can't overcome that. So, we'll see. Carolina's got two more games on this road trip before coming home against Nashville on Friday. Hopefully they can get something out of the trip. Feel good about themselves when they hit home ice again.