This round of NHL Predictions sees the Carolina Hurricanes “shipping up to Boston” as they take on the Bruins at TD Garden. Boston remains at the top of the league after another strong showing against the Winnipeg Jets on Monday night.

Their 4-1 win over the Jets broke Winnipeg’s stretch of consecutive games without allowing more than two or three goals. Currently, on a five-game winning streak, the Bruins are almost mimicking their impressive regular season last year even though most expected a slight drop-off. Unsurprisingly, David Pastrnak continues his stellar play as he leads the Bruins in goals with 30.

Carolina comes into this one on sort of shaky ground once again. They started the season extremely inconsistent but somehow stuck around the upper side of the Metropolitan Division. Then they hit a stretch of hot play that included a five-game win streak with a slightly longer point streak. But as of late, the Hurricanes have seemed to have fallen back to inconsistency.

The Hurricanes are 7-2-1 in their last ten but their last four has been a major seesaw. They beat the Pittsburgh Penguins in overtime. They then followed it up with a bad showing against the Los Angeles Kings at home. Carolina then turned around and beat the then-hot Detroit Red Wings. This was followed up by one of arguably their most frustrating games against the Minnesota Wild. That one ended in a 5-2 loss even though the shots

This won’t be an easy one for Carolina and given their seemingly typical poor performance when the game is on a national broadcast, this has all the signs of a tough outing. But if they can pull it off, these three keys will be important for the Hurricanes.

The Hurricanes found some consistency with three out of its four lines over their recent strong stretch of play. The “SAT” line leading the way of Andrei Svechnikov, Sebastian Aho and Teuvo Teravainen was great. Jack Drury and Stefan Noesen have shown chemistry on line four while the newly created line three of Jordan Martinook, Jordan Staal and Seth Jarvis were finding results as well as chances.

However, the de facto second line has been anything but consistent. Centring around (ironically) the centre on that line of Jesperi Kotkaniemi, it just hasn’t seemed to find any rhythm no matter who has been there. We have seen Kotkaniemi with Michael Bunting, Stefan Noesen, Jesper Fast and other random combinations.

But for whatever reason the early success Kotkaniemi was finding is simply gone. It almost seems mental at this point because visually his on-ice play has generally been fairly reliable but the offensive flow and results haven’t been there.

With Drury and Noesen playing so well and this “second line” simply not, the game against Minnesota saw the lines seem to take a flip. The last is the first and the first is the last, or something like that.