The Carolina Hurricanes’ Patience and Persistence Have Won Them the 2026 NHL Stanley Cup Final
I walked into what was then called PNC Arena, now the Lenovo “Lenny” Center, for my first day of work as the Hurricanes beat reporter for The Athletic in October 2018. It was more-or-less Hurricanes head coach Rod Brind’Amour’s “first day of work” as head coach, too, though his preparation for the role started long before that day.
I asked him and then-Captain Justin Williams a question: “What are your goals for the season, other than making it to the play–”
Williams cut me off before I could say the word “playoffs.”
“That’s, that just shouldn’t even be a goal,” he said. “You expect to do it. Our goal shouldn’t be to make the playoffs; that’s not great. We need to raise the bar a little bit. As far as goals, you always keep trying to attain them, then make other ones.”
Though I hadn’t been around the team at all before this moment – I’d never even been to Raleigh until my first day on the job – I could sense that this philosophy from Brind’Amour and Williams was a departure, an attempt to set the tone for a new era. And frankly, if this era didn’t quickly bring more success than the previous decade, the franchise was screwed.
The Hurricanes last made the playoffs in 2009, and relocation rumors were swirling as the controversially stingy owner, Peter Karmanos, sold the team to Billionaire hockey outsider Tom Dundon halfway through the previous season.
Dundon quickly got to work. He fired GM Ron Francis, known for his unwillingness to rock the boat at the trade deadline, a trait that stemmed in part from Karmonos’ stinginess. He hired GM Don Waddell, a well-liked “hockey guy” who could provide a friendly face for the franchise, and made some tough, often unpopular, but mostly necessary decisions to climb back to relevance and out of a financial hole.
He promoted Brind’Amour to head coach after Brind’Amour served seven years as an assistant coach for the team, and I think people forget that this decision wasn’t super popular at the time. Don’t get me wrong, Brind’Amour was a beloved franchise legend, the first and only captain to win the Cup for the team as a player in 2006, and fans wanted him to succeed as head coach.
But there was also an extreme distrust of decisions that could appear cheap or lazy after a decade of the franchise operating almost exclusively in that way. The fanbase was also hungry for change, and Brind’Amour had been part of the middling coaching staff through the dark years.
From the first conversation I ever had with Dundon, well before the Canes made it back to the playoffs later that first season, he enthusiastically defended the decision to promote Brind’Amour. He told me he cast a wide net in his coaching search, but at the end of the day, he felt no one could succeed at this specific job more than Brind’Amour.
After eight straight seasons of the Hurricanes making the playoffs – which is success in its own right – Brind’Amour’s Hurricanes have achieved the ultimate mark of success.
Dundon and all of his abrasiveness were right. Brind’Amour, his love for the franchise, and all of his Brind’Amisms were right. GM Eric Tulsky and all of his patents and academic degrees were right. Jordan Staal, all of his 37 years of age, and his six goals in six Cup Final games were right, on his way to the Conn Smythe Award. Sebastian Aho, and his stubborn dedication to playing the game the right way above personal accolades, was right. The goaltending tandem of Freddie Andersen and Brandon Bussi, utilized in the same fashion in the Cup Finals that got the Canes the top seed in the East in the regular season, was right.
After 20 years – half of them really bleak, half of them brighter, all of them leading up to this very moment – the Stanley Cup belongs to the Carolina Hurricanes.
This Stanley Cup comes after eight playoff runs with this core. Change and stubbornness are equally to blame.
You can thank Dundon for encouraging management to spend to the cap ceiling again, and you can thank Tulsky for using that privilege more like a scientist in a lab than a kid in a Mikko Rantanen-sized candy store.
Give credit to Tulsky, by the way, for turning the Rantanen situation into a Cup win. Logan Stankoven, acquired from Dallas when Rantanen was flipped to the Stars, put up 16 points in 19 playoff games. The money that would have gone toward a Rantanen extension was instead allocated to major offseason acquisitions in Ehlers and K’Andre Miller.
These are the changes that took this Hurricanes roster from good to great to Stanley Cup Champion caliber.
You can thank Brind’Amour for the hard-working philosophy and style of play that have persisted all these years and have now ultimately prevailed. It hasn’t always been perfect or popular: Scoring has dried up in ECFs aplenty, Hurricanes players have rarely shown up at the top of league-scoring rankings, and exhaustion from all the shot-suppressing has set in.
But this year, all of the toiling finally paid off. This year, the Hurricanes had the scoring depth – and the health – to pull it all off. The Canes were the only team in the league this year to have seven or more 20+ goal scorers. While their counterpart, the Golden Knights, relied on big-name performances from their Mitch Marners through their poor second half of the season, the Canes had the unflappable infrastructure and full-team buy-in to stay even-keeled.
They hadn’t lost back-to-back games since January, and you saw them pull from this confidence throughout one of the most chaotic Stanley Cup Finals of all time. Their shot-suppressing, Corsi-is-king game reared its head more and more through each game in the Cup Final, and eventually the Golden Knights had nowhere to hide, no magical star power to pull from.
The Hurricanes never needed a quick fix, a magic trick, or a last-second coaching change to win a Stanley Cup. They needed eight years of hard work, belief in the system, and, yeah, a few more goal-scorers with the right attitude.
The Carolina Hurricanes might’ve taken the long way to arrive at their first Stanley Cup in 20 years, but they did it their way. There’s something satisfying about the authenticity, hard work, and slow burn of this Stanley Cup in a world full of quick fixes and magic tricks.
