The Athletic has live coverage of Hurricanes vs. Golden Knights in Game 6 of the 2026 Stanley Cup Final.
RALEIGH, N.C. — Back in October, Andrei Svechnikov looked like a player searching for himself.
The explosive winger who can dominate games with his speed, strength and shot spent long stretches looking strangely invisible. The goals didn’t come. The hits weren’t there. The confidence seemed to ebb.
Coincidentally, when the Hurricanes got to Las Vegas during a long early road trip, Svechnikov was demoted to the fourth line. Coach Rod Brind’Amour said he was disappearing too much and they’d need him, especially come playoff time.
As Svechnikov went the first eight games of the season without a goal on only 15 shots, chatter started throughout the NHL. What the heck was going on? GMs around the league were paying attention, wondering if things could get messier and Svechnikov could be on the move.
But one person who was not worried — well, besides Svechnikov — was Hurricanes GM Eric Tulsky. During a sitdown with The Athletic at the team hotel in Las Vegas in late October, Tulsky wasn’t bothered one iota about his top-line winger skating a dozen minutes a night in a bottom-six role: “He has been a difference-maker in the lineup and will be a difference-maker in the lineup again.”
Thursday night, when the Hurricanes most needed him, Svechnikov scored two power-play goals to help the Hurricanes to a 4-2 victory over the Vegas Golden Knights to drag Carolina to the precipice of its second Stanley Cup title in franchise history.
In a jubilant locker room after the game, the soft-spoken Canes GM was reminded of that October interview.
“Look, he’s a great player, he’s extremely skilled, he’s big and strong and physical,” Tulsky told The Athletic. “He’s the kind of player you need in the playoffs, and whether the puck’s going in the net or not, he can make a difference on any shift. And tonight he showed that.
“His skills have always been there, and sometimes it’s clicking and sometimes it isn’t. But I was never worried that he wouldn’t come around.”
What was so impressive about Svechnikov at the start of the season was that as he started getting scrutiny from fans and media, he remained largely positive. After a six-game road trip, Svechnikov returned to Carolina and faced the music of a group of reporters on the morning of a game against, you guessed it, Vegas. He didn’t whine about his role. He didn’t complain about Brind’Amour’s early-season tough love. He made clear he wasn’t about to march into Tulsky’s office and say it was time to move on.
He simply said he wasn’t good enough and he needed to find his game. But he was not frustrated by his role. He was positive.
“If you see me break a stick, then there is frustration,” Svechnikov kidded at the time. “You stay positive. If you go negative, then it’s going to get worse and worse. So I try to stay positive. It’s fine. Maybe for some (on the outside) it’s a bigger deal. I’m on the fourth line, but for me, it’s not that big of a deal. I’ve been there — maybe not in the start of the year, but I’ve been there many times, so it’s fine, totally fine.”
Later that night, Svechnikov scored his first goal of the season and had four shots on goal. He scored the next game, and three games after that, and the next game after that. He finished the regular season with a career-high 31 goals and 70 points.
“He’s an incredibly professional athlete, who from his conditioning to his handling of the media to his handling of game situations, he is extremely mature,” Tulsky said Thursday night. “He plays with an edge and a lot of emotion, but he still manages to keep his mindset in the right place and make sure that he’s pushing the team forward whenever he can.”
Svechnikov said after Thursday’s game that those first 10 games of the season were tough.
But he was proudest of the fact, “I tried to always fight through it, and it doesn’t matter what’s happening (on the outside). And I always try to stay positive, and that’s what kind of happened, and I think I had my best season of my career, and right now as a team we got the best playoffs so far.”
Svechnikov already has 84 playoff games under his belt, and that’s with missing the 2023 playoffs with a torn ACL. Last year, during Carolina’s run to the conference final, he scored eight goals and 12 points in 15 games. But this postseason, he’s been a little quiet, entering Thursday’s game with four goals.
“He got it going (in the regular season), and in the playoffs here tonight, I hope this kick-starts him because we need him scoring goals like he did tonight,” Brind’Amour said.
Nikolaj Ehlers assisted on two of Svechnikov’s goals, the second one being a back-door slam dunk where Svechnikov said he knew Ehlers would find him.
“To be honest, you know what kind of passes Fly can make, but I just worked kind of back door and I knew he was going to make that pass because he just sees everything on the ice, and I just kind of had to stick out my stick there and he’s going to hit it and he did,” Svechnikov said.
But Svechnikov’s reaction showed how much he was waiting for this breakout, and in such a huge game.
“He’s the hardest worker of this group, he wants it more than anything, and he continues to try to make himself better and find ways to contribute,” said captain Jordan Staal, who has six goals in five games this series. “There’s ups and downs in everyone’s careers, and it was a slow start for him, but he continued to build his game this year, and tonight was a big one for us.”
At his best, the 26-year-old Svechnikov is one of the most physically gifted forwards in hockey, capable of taking over a game almost by himself. At his worst, he can disappear for stretches that leave everyone wondering where Carolina’s most dangerous winger went.
But on Thursday night, with Carolina unwilling to return to Vegas with a 3-2 series deficit, Svechnikov delivered the first multi-power-play-goal game of his postseason career and the second by a Hurricanes player in a Stanley Cup Final, joining Eric Staal in the 2006 final.
Every shift seemed to carry purpose. Every puck battle mattered. Every touch felt dangerous.
For one night at least, Svechnikov authored the kind of June performance Carolina has been waiting for and one Tulsky almost expected way back in October.
“This is the biggest thing in my life, personally, but thank God we won that game and obviously our focus right now … in our mind, we’ve got one more win to do here and we’re all focused for the next game,” Svechnikov said.
