RALEIGH, N.C. — The system isn’t the problem. The Carolina Hurricanes didn’t exit the playoffs with another loss to the Florida Panthers because of the way they play. Full stop.

The difference between the teams, the reason the Hurricanes have lost to the Panthers twice in the conference finals in three years, isn’t style. It’s talent. The gap isn’t big, but it’s real.

And on Friday, two days after he single-handedly staked the Hurricanes to a 2-0 lead they would squander in season-ending fashion in Game 5, Sebastian Aho threw down a challenge to the front office: Go get us more of it.

“Last offseason, to be honest, I was disappointed how it went,” Aho said. “We lost a couple guys I would like us to keep. At the trade deadline we tried to make a push and we do appreciate the team wants us to get better so there was — I feel like maybe, making the right choices in the offseason and picking up some pieces so maybe you don’t have to try to throw a Hail Mary at the deadline.”

Later, Aho doubled down: “Everyone keeps saying we have a lot of cap space and we have assets. Hopefully we are able to take the next step in that department, too.”

Shots fired.

The season may be over, but Aho is still going with the “shot-volume approach,” as critics of the Hurricanes’ style like to put it.

It is unquestionably a big summer for the Hurricanes, albeit a different kind of summer. They don’t face the kind of free-agent exodus they endured last summer when players like Brett Pesce, Brady Skjei and Teuvo Teravainen all departed. First-year general manager Eric Tulsky acted nimbly to fill those voids with players like Shayne Gostisbehere, Sean Walker and Jack Roslovic, but it’s hard to argue the Hurricanes were better than they were a year earlier. At best, they held the line. Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour later admitted he was unsure if he even had a playoff-worthy team in September.

It turned out far better than that. They took a big swing and miss with the midseason misfire for Mikko Rantanen, and salvaged something out of it with Logan Stankoven — who scored more goals this postseason than Martin Necas ever did — but when the rubber met the ice, the Panthers had players who made bigger plays and were pressured into fewer mistakes. Aleksander Barkov’s move to set up Carter Verhaeghe for the series-winning goal Wednesday was a superstar play by a superstar player.

It’s safe to assume Brent Burns and Dmitry Orlov won’t be re-signed, and Jesperi Kotkaniemi’s contract has reached the point where a buyout is feasible even if a trade isn’t, and either way the Hurricanes need an upgrade there. Alexander Nikishin is clearly NHL-ready, and Scott Morrow’s baptism by fire in the playoffs should equip him for fill-in duty on the blue line.

So the Hurricanes don’t have a lot of work to do, but they have two giant holes to fill: A top-four caliber right-shot defenseman and a center legitimately capable of playing on the top two lines, which Kotkaniemi was not no matter how hard the Hurricanes wished he was. Neither of those needs are easily filled in the free-agent market, which will require some creativity on Tulsky’s part. But he has shown, last summer and with Seth Jarvis’ contract extension and his pivot on Rantanen, an ability to untie tangled knots.

While outsiders might question the viability of the entire project, the reality is the Panthers pivoted to mimic the Hurricanes after winning the President’s Trophy in 2022 and getting swept by the Tampa Bay Lightning in the playoffs. The difference is more top-end talent at forward — Barkov and Matthew Tkachuk and Sam Bennett and Sam Reinhart and Verhaeghe — to go with more size on the back end and more depth throughout the lineup.

“How do you think they play?” Brind’Amour said after Wednesday’s loss. “They’re the standard now. Out, in, forecheck hard, wait for your chances, try to capitalize. It’s hard hockey. If anything, we’ve got to figure out how to get that much to our game. But that’s the standard, right there. I feel like that’s been our game for a long time. They kind of picked it up the last couple years and made it that much better. That’s what we’ve got to get to.”

All that said, the Hurricanes rolled over the New Jersey Devils and Washington Capitals and showed they could outplay the Panthers for long stretches of the series, and were undone by errors of their own making. The gap isn’t as big as a 1-8 record in two playoff series might make it look.

There is a gap, though, and if the Panthers are “the standard,” then the Hurricanes need to get stronger at center and bigger and deeper up and down the roster to meet that standard. With the Burns and Orlov contracts off the books, the money and ammunition — four first-round draft picks over the next three years — are there to do it. The Hurricanes will have about $20 million in cap space to play with, and they have to weaponize it.

Despite Aho’s understandable frustrations at seeing beloved teammates depart, the Hurricanes did about as well as they could have done last summer under the circumstances. The tumblers were always slowly clicking into place to make big moves this summer. The team’s slightly unexpected success moved up the calendar, leading to the ill-fated Rantanen trade, but now the time has come.

This season, through two playoff rounds, demonstrated the strength of the foundation and just how close the Hurricanes actually are. Then the Panthers could not have shown more clearly the bar the Hurricanes still have to clear.

“We have some really good pieces here,” Aho said, “but it’s a really big offseason for us.”

Aho’s not wrong on either count. The assignment is clear. It’s up to Tulsky and owner Tom Dundon to answer his challenge.

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