RALEIGH, N.C. — In the past few seasons, both as a Carolina Hurricanes assistant general manager and now as their GM, Eric Tulsky has participated in several aggressive moves.
The team’s trade for Jake Guentzel and the two deals involving Mikko Rantanen immediately come to mind. Those, along with attempts to go after Matthew Tkachuk, Elias Pettersson and Quinn Hughes — to name a few of the known targets — have shown Carolina is willing to push its chips to the middle of the table to try and get better.
The Hurricanes didn’t sit on their collective hands this season either. But it has also been one where patience has proven both necessary and an asset.
“I would say you need to have a recognition of when patience is called for,” Tulsky told The Athletic in an interview this week, as Carolina awaits the start of its second-round Stanley Cup playoff series against the Philadelphia Flyers. “We try very hard to be aggressive and not let patience turn into contentment. We never want to say it’s good enough, just leave it alone. But there are times that it is the best play to let something play out.”
From an outside view, 2025-26 probably looked like a typical season in Raleigh. The Hurricanes stood near the top of the standings throughout, again a legitimate contender in a league where other playoff teams are turning over at eye-popping rates.
But the old, reliable Hurricanes were right where everyone expected. A closer look, however, uncovers one of the most challenging seasons of Rod Brind’Amour’s tenure as coach.
Carolina went without Jaccob Slavin, the linchpin in the team’s defensive excellence, for more than half the season. Frederik Andersen, a steadying force in net during his half-decade in Raleigh, was the healthiest he has been in years, yet went through arguably the most difficult regular season of his career. Furthermore, the Hurricanes decided — despite being firmly in their window of contention — to take a chance on moving Logan Stankoven to center, a gamble they hoped would pay off even if there were growing pains.
Being aggressive is hard, but being patient can be even tougher.
Getting Slavin healthy and back came with two deadlines: Yes, Carolina wanted to be sure Slavin would be at his best for when things mattered most, but the team was also cognizant of the opportunity Slavin would have playing for Team USA in the Olympics.
“That was a tough situation,” Tulsky said. “He had something come up in the offseason that initially seemed like it wouldn’t take that long for him to get back to playing, and we went through the return protocol and got him ready and realized that it actually needed a little more time than we thought.
“And from there, we decided patience was the right play.”
That meant relying on veteran Mike Reilly and a few rookies, specifically Charles Alexis Legault and Joel Nystrom.
“Credit to the players who were stepping in when he was out,” Tulsky said. “And we had other defense out too, and we had guys coming up from the AHL and playing well and keeping our heads above water and making it so that we could take that long-term view on it.”
Slavin’s return has been most noticeable in critical situations. The Hurricanes had nearly 36 minutes of penalty-kill time in their first-round sweep of the Senators, and Slavin played 24:45 of them. In Game 1 of the series, Slavin played the final 4:08 of a tight game, helping seal a 2-0 win.
“I said something to him about it afterwards, and he sort of shrugged and said he could have played four more if he needed to,” Tulsky said. “So his athletic ability, his drive, his intelligence about the game — he’s just off the charts in a lot of different ways, and it makes him a really impactful player.”
Tulsky and the Hurricanes also knew what Andersen was capable of, even if his regular season had many wondering if his career was coming to an end. Carolina struck gold with NHL rookie Brandon Bussi, who went from waiver wire fallback to record-breaking goalie. But the injury that cost Pyotr Kochetkov the rest of the regular season, coupled with Andersen’s play, raised questions about the Hurricanes’ situation in net heading into the trade deadline and beyond.
“Freddie has a long track record and was playing better than his numbers showed,” Tulsky said. “Pyotr was ahead of schedule on his rehab, and so we knew that there were three that could play out well with the group we had. That gave us some license to look for opportunities out there but not feel any sense of desperation.”
That patience has also paid off thus far. Andersen befuddled the Senators for four games and firmly established himself as Carolina’s No. 1 heading into the second round against the Flyers, and the team still has both Bussi and Kochetkov to fall back on if needed.
And then there’s Stankoven. The list of 5-foot-8 centers in the NHL is short this season — it’s one. So moving Stankoven to the middle in training camp certainly raised the eyebrows of many, especially considering Carolina has several other smallish players among its forward corps.
But Stankoven’s play as a winger in last year’s playoffs gave the Hurricanes hope he would be able to handle the rigors of moving to center even when the stakes were elevated in the postseason.
“I think we went through last year’s playoffs and came out of it feeling like he elevated his game in the playoffs and showed what he could do,” Tulsky said. “And we went through the summer, and by the time we got to October, November, December, people were worried that he’d be too small for the playoffs, and that’s sort of strange to me, right? He’d already been through once. He had already shown he could elevate his game.
“So we knew he had that in him, and even if he hadn’t been through a playoff, just the way he plays, the fire he plays with — you have to know that he’s going to be able to handle the pressure.”
Stankoven has — convincingly. He was the breakout player of Carolina’s first-round win, scoring in all four games in a series with only 16 total goals.
All three examples of patience got the Hurricanes through the first round, though not without a few bumps and bruises.
Rookie defenseman Alexander Nikishin was concussed on a hit by Ottawa defenseman Tyler Kleven in Game 4 against the Senators, a play Tulsky called “a good, hard hit.”
Added Tulsky, “It’s definitely a situation where our player barely had the puck and was in a vulnerable spot, and you hate to see that, but in the end, the playoffs are physical games, and that kind of hit happens.”
Nikishin was back on the ice with the Hurricanes on Wednesday, though in a no-contact jersey.
Nikolaj Ehlers didn’t play in Game 4 due to a lower-body injury after being the only Hurricanes player to suit up for all 82 regular-season games. Tulsky didn’t speculate on Ehlers’ status, but the weeklong break between series will surely benefit the speedy winger.
The time off, however, raises the rest-versus-rust dynamic.
“There’s no way to know the right answer,” Tulsky said. “My instinct is always to prefer rest. It’s a long season and a lot of physical fatigue, as well as accumulated injuries and the opportunity to lighten the load for a little bit and have some real practice time and work on implementing some things and perfecting some things in practice has real upside for us.
“So my instinct is always to prefer as much rest as we can get. But obviously, there are reasons to prefer to keep in a rhythm when things are going well.”
The Hurricanes can expect a different sort of series against the Philadelphia Flyers, who snuck into the playoffs late in the regular season and then ousted their rival Penguins in six games. Like Carolina, Philadelphia got excellent goaltending — courtesy of Dan Vladar — in Round 1, but the Flyers, as they were during the regular season, lagged behind analytically and also had the league’s worst power play.
That said, Philadelphia has some young, top-end talent that can tilt a game in its favor.
“They have a lot of speed on that team and ability to create counterattacks and quick strikes that can turn a game,” Tulsky said, “and that’s always a challenge to deal with when you have a team that is young and fast and aggressive in transition like that.”
Both teams will need to be patient while waiting for the other playoff teams to catch up and for the NHL to set a schedule for the second round. Meanwhile, the Hurricanes’ staff will use the time to find ways to exploit the Flyers while giving their players some downtime before the next task.
