As you are seeing, playoffs are a different beast. Special teams are making a noticeable difference in NYR's favor as I said pre-series it would.
It's against lesser competition in the regular season. Perhaps Canes are better than the Rangers at killing average powerplays and better at scoring against average penalty kills.
But playoffs are about how you are against the other best teams in the league when they gameplan around you for 4-7 games straight. The one size-fits-all way of finding success in the regular season against two dozen teams doesn't always translate against a single good team night after night.
There's still a lot of series left to play though. The lopsided special teams performance can easily swing the other way with some adjustments (even though I hope they don't).
Don't disagree with any of this and even stated in another post that the NYR PP should be feared and the best way Canes can avoid getting burned there is to stay out of the box... which they haven't done.
All of the PP goals that NYR have scored in this series are perfect examples of them playing to their strengths and leaning into Carolina's weaknesses. They aren't good at moving bodies from the front of the net and Freddie doesn't have amazing rebound control. The 3rd and 4th goals aren't on him, but more the scrambly Canes in front of the net.
Aho scooped the puck out from under Freddie and put it right onto Kreider's stick. Not ideal. The 2OT winning goal was a crazy pinball follow the puck and Trochek was in the right place right time to slide it home after another scramble.
So I go back to... don't take penalties. But if you do you have to get better at clearing things in front of the net. You can't play the game of chasing the Rangers trying to intercept cross ice passes because they are too good at that and it will leave Mika (or whoever) open for one-timers that will go in if it's a clean look.
I think the take away the Canes should have on the PP side is that they just need to get pucks to the net. Igor's only real weakness(ish) is on long range shots and probably going for tips or high blocker. You aren't scoring on him in close and low on the ice for the most part. He is amazingly quick with his legs and he covers angles super well so cross ice passes won't work on him the way they do on other goalies. He has good rebound control but sometimes he overplays the angles and can be out of position for the rebound. Canes need to scoop those up like Kreider and Trochek due.
Guys like Staal, Martinook, Jarvis, Guentzel, Aho Noesen, Drury can all do that. They had chances last game but didn't bury them when they did.
100% agree you cannot play against the Rangers like other teams and expect to win based on what works against other teams/goalies.