Hurricanes' Teuvo Teravainen breaks hand, out for first round

Carolina Hurricanes winger Teuvo Teravainen will miss the remainder of the first round after suffering a broken hand in his team's 4-3 overtime win Wednesday against the New York Islanders.

The Hurricanes, who have a 2-0 series lead, will be without one of their top-six forwards after Teravainen was injured on a slash from Islanders forward Jean-Gabriel Pageau. Teravainen had control of the puck on the inner half of the left faceoff circle when he launched a shot on net with Pageau extending his stick and striking Teravainen's hand almost instantaneously.

Pageau was not penalized while Teravainen will have surgery Thursday morning.

Meanwhile, Hurricanes coach Rod Brind'Amour voiced his frustrations after the game.

"[The] 4:25 marker, he broke his hand. With the puck, takes a shot, the guy absolutely tomahawk chops him. Absolutely," Brind'Amour said. "I know we had all the power plays, so you're not going to make it a 5-on-3, but go take a look at the video. He's out for the series, so there you go. They're going to complain about all the power plays, but it's a tomahawk chop. We just watched it. He has to have surgery tomorrow. There you go. So I'm a little pissed, I'll be honest with you."

Losing Teravainen for even the remainder of the first round is the latest blow for a Hurricanes roster that has been forced to reconfigure its top-six forward situation because of injuries since the calendar flipped to 2023.

It started in January when the team lost winger Max Pacioretty for the rest of the season to a non-contact Achilles injury. The Hurricanes traded for Pacioretty in the offseason with the hope that landing a six-time 30-goal scorer would strengthen their championship aspirations.

Pacioretty required offseason Achilles surgery in August that kept him out for six months until he returned Jan. 5. Pacioretty had three goals in his first five games before tearing his Achilles in the last minute of a 5-2 win against the Minnesota Wild on Jan. 19.

On March 13, the team announced it would be without one of its leading goal scorers, winger Andrei Svechnikov, after he injured his right knee for an indefinite period. Two days later, the team announced the 22-year-old star would miss the rest of the season as he required reconstructive ACL surgery to repair his knee.

Even with those injuries to Pacioretty and Svechnikov, who scored 23 goals and 55 assists in 64 games, the Hurricanes still won the Metropolitan Division by a point over the New Jersey Devils.

Now they will seek to get out of the first round for the third time in the past four seasons without Teravainen. The two-way winger had 12 goals and 37 points in 68 regular-season games while logging more than 100 short-handed minutes for a Hurricanes penalty kill that entered the postseason ranked second in the NHL with an 84.4% success rate.