NHL playoffs create unlikely stars, none less likely than Canes’ Mackenzie MacEachern

Thursday morning, Mackenzie MacEachern was planning to get settled in Raleigh after flying in from Chicago, a new arrival from the minor leagues getting his bearings since he hadn’t been around the big club since training camp, planning to get a few practices with the team.

By Thursday afternoon, he was told to head straight for the charter flight to New York with the Carolina Hurricanes. By Saturday morning, he was being told to be ready to play. By Sunday morning, he got to the arena and saw his name in the lineup. Two shifts into the game Sunday afternoon, he was on the Hurricanes’ top line. By Sunday evening, he was tied for sixth on the Hurricanes in playoff scoring.

All of which is enough to make even the most dedicated Hurricanes fan — and perhaps even a few of his new teammates, even if they claim to remember him from October — ask the most important and obvious question:

Who?

This is the power and the glory of the playoffs, forever and ever, amen. Heroes aren’t born, they’re created, sometimes out of practically nothing. This was less than nothing.

MacEachern didn’t play a single regular-season game for the Hurricanes, and there he was dressed for Game 4 of this series against the New York Islanders, replacing the previously injured Teuvo Teravainen in the lineup and the newly injured Jack Drury on the Hurricanes’ top line with Sebastian Aho and Seth Jarvis.

And not just that. A guy who got sent to the AHL in training camp, spent the whole season there and much of it injured, shows up for a make-or-break playoff game and ends up setting up the game-winning goal before scoring one of his own in a 5-2 win — giving the Hurricanes a 3-1 series lead and delivering their first true road playoff win since June 2021 and their first in regulation since they beat the Islanders (in a different rink) in 2019.

Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour may not have seen all of that coming, exactly, but he had very little hesitation putting MacEachern’s name on the sheet Sunday after Derek Stepan’s turnover cost them a goal Friday, and very little choice putting MacEachern with Aho and Jarvis once Ryan Pulock ran Drury face-first into the boards — giving the Hurricanes a two-man advantage that led to Jarvis’ opening goal.

“Sometimes, it’s easy. The choices are made for you,” Brind’Amour said. “You’re looking at the next guy up and hoping it sticks a little.”

But it wasn’t quite as simple as that. Brind’Amour acknowledged he was even thinking about playing MacEachern on Friday, because MacEachern had “jumped off the page” as Brind’Amour watched the Chicago Wolves’ final few games just in case yet another forward went down to join Max Pacioretty and Andrei Svechnikov. He also called Wolves coach Brock Sheahan, who offered his full endorsement of the 29-year old Michigan State product.

And for MacEachern’s part, it wasn’t like he was coming out of nowhere in the big picture, if not the smaller world of the Hurricanes. In addition to the 115 regular-season games he played for the St. Louis Blues, he did have five games of playoff experience on their way to the Stanley Cup in 2020. That, he later admitted, was in the COVID bubble, so not quite like the hostile environment the Hurricanes have faced on Long Island, but not all that different, either.

“I got a handful of NHL (playoff) games, and when I wasn’t playing I got to see some of the best players in the NHL playing and preparing,” MacEachern said. “I think just being around some really good veterans and playing in the NHL myself really helped me out.”

MacEachern isn’t as skilled as Teravainen, and he hasn’t played with the Hurricanes the way Drury has, but he skates well enough to keep up with Aho and Jarvis and gives them a slightly bigger body to clear some space. The fit there may have been unexpected, but not incomprehensible.

Still, these are the fine margins that can determine fate: For everything that went right for MacEachern over the final 58 minutes of the game, it nearly went all wrong. MacEachern turned the puck over on his first shift and Antti Raanta had to make a save on the chance that resulted.

“You guys go back and watch, I was a little nervous. I missed the pass,” MacEachern said. “If ‘Raants’ didn’t stand on his head there, things might have gone a little differently. I’m thankful for that.”

And if MacEachern needed to convince Aho of his bona fides, he couldn’t have done any better than his return pass — a delicate, tricky one — on the second-period two-on-one that Aho started by forcing an Alexander Romanov turnover and then finished to make it 3-0.

“Unreal plays. Big plays in a big moment,” Aho said. “That pass on the two-on-one, it’s full speed, a backhand pass right in my wheelhouse. That’s a great play. Unreal stuff. That’s playoff hockey.”

It is. Is it ever. There’s a place in Hurricanes’ postseason history now for MacEachern, at least this small one, maybe an even bigger one, because his four-day whirlwind isn’t stopping now that everybody knows his name.

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