The eighth time was the charm. The Carolina Hurricanes endured seven consecutive seasons of playoff heartbreak, but they stayed the course and were finally rewarded with the Stanley Cup on Sunday night.
Rod Brind'Amour took over as coach of the Hurricanes in 2018 and immediately took them from sixth place in their own division to the Eastern Conference Final. Carolina didn't know it at the time, but that would become the ceiling -- one the team would hit its head on repeatedly over the next six years.
The Hurricanes did a lot of winning in the first seven years of Brind'Amour's tenure. They just never did enough, at least not at the right time of year. Carolina failed to advance past the first round once (in the COVID bubble playoffs) but could never break through to the Stanley Cup Final.
Hurricanes postseason results since 2018-19
SeasonPlayoff result2018-19
L, conference final (Bruins)
2019-20
L, first round (Bruins)
2020-21
L, second round (Lightning)
2021-22
L, second round (Rangers)
2022-23
L, conference final (Panthers)
2023-24
L, second round (Rangers)
2024-25
L, conference final (Panthers)
2025-26
W, Stanley Cup Final
Over the years, those playoff shortcomings led to widespread skepticism from outsiders. Maybe Brind'Amour's offensive system, which generates a high quantity of low-danger shots, wasn't a recipe for success in the playoffs. Perhaps Carolina's lack of true star power held the team back against the elite teams in the Eastern Conference.
In fact, those doubts didn't exist solely among fans and media. Even Brind'Amour admitted to second-guessing himself over the last eight years.
"Listen, you always have doubt," Brind'Amour said in his postgame press conference. "It creeps in. It creeps in all the time. I felt like this team could've done this many, many times. But something would just go off the rails a little."
Instead of letting doubt and frustration get the better of them, the Hurricanes remained poised and stayed the course. They knew they had the ingredients for a winning formula. Carolina just needed patience, guts and a little luck to get across the finish line.
Patience with the core, coach
Five players -- Sebastian Aho, Jordan Staal, Jordan Martinook, Jaccob Slavin and Andrei Svechnikov -- have been on the roster for every season under Brind'Amour. Other pieces have come and gone, but that quintet remained to build the culture that manifests itself on the ice every night.
At some point over the last eight seasons, when regular-season wins were plentiful, but the Stanley Cup seemed impossible to capture, the Hurricanes could've made sweeping changes to that core, which doesn't look as formidable as those of other championship contenders on paper.
Aho is a great two-way center, but he didn't always look like the No. 1 option on a true Stanley Cup contender. Peers like Aleksander Barkov and Brayden Point got the best of him in the playoffs. For seven years, Andrei Svechnikov was a productive player, but he didn't live up to the expectations that come with being the No. 2 overall pick in the NHL Draft. Too often, the scoring touch he displayed in the regular season vanished when it mattered most.
Staal and Martinook are veteran forecheckers in a league that's getting increasingly younger. Martinook has never tallied more than 36 points in a single season. Staal has never scored more than 38 points under Brind'Amour. Carolina could have looked outside the organization for upgrades, but Brind'Amour and the front office knew what they had.
"My first acquisition was Jordan Martinook," Brind'Amour said. "I remember having lunch with him, and I was like, 'Hey, we're trying to build something. The kind of player you are, your personality, that's what we're building around here.' Same thing with Jordan (Staal). Every day, it's the same. He just brings people into the fight. Even Sebastian Aho, sitting beside Jordan every day and watching what he does. That's the power of leadership. I'm really happy for those guys."
That patience was also extended to Brind'Amour himself. In today's NHL, general managers and owners have quick triggers and little time for repeated playoff failures. It was this time a year ago that the Dallas Stars fired Peter DeBoer on the heels of his third consecutive Western Conference Final appearance.
Being a franchise legend certainly brought Brind'Amour some goodwill, but his positive impact on the team was evident, and the Hurricanes chose to stick with him even as playoff defeats piled up. That was the right call because Carolina probably isn't celebrating its second Cup in team history without Brind'Amour behind the bench.
Other organizations may have taken a sledgehammer to the core or made a coaching change over the last eight seasons, but Carolina took the more patient route. A couple more key players, like Seth Jarvis, became part of the core, but players who helped build the culture in Raleigh were very rarely subtracted.
Carolina coach Rod Brind'Amour lifts the Stanley Cup after the Hurricanes' Game 6 win over Vegas. Getty Images Guts to swing from the heels
On March 7, 2024, the Hurricanes acquired Jake Guentzel from the Pittsburgh Penguins in a splashy move at the trade deadline. It seemed as though Carolina had found the missing piece to its championship puzzle. As one of the most skilled offensive players in the NHL, Guentzel was exactly what the Canes needed to exorcise their playoff demons.
Over the next four months, the Hurricanes lost in the second round of the playoffs, and Guentzel signed with the Tampa Bay Lightning after the two couldn't reach terms on a new contract. The Canes had given up assets to land the biggest fish on the trade market and lost him for next to nothing.
Hurricanes general manager Eric Tulsky, then the assistant general manager, had a front-row seat for that big whiff. But it didn't make him more hesitant to swing after his promotion the following season. It just made him wiser.
Less than a year after Carolina traded for Guentzel, on Jan. 24, 2025, the team traded its most dynamic playmaker in an attempt to land another bona fide superstar. Martin Necas went to the Colorado Avalanche, and Mikko Rantanen made his way to Raleigh in a three-way deal that also brought eventual playoff hero Taylor Hall to the Canes as an add-on.
Unfortunately for Tulsky and the Canes, it was deja vu as that move didn't go as planned either. Guentzel's 28-game stint with Carolina looked like an eternity next to Rantanen, who played all of 13 games with the Hurricanes before another trade sent him to the Dallas Stars.
It looked as though the Hurricanes had swung and missed again, except this time it cost them one of their best young players. Ultimately, it turned out to be one of the most shrewd moves in recent memory.
When Tulsky realized that Rantanen, a pending free agent, was unlikely to sign a long-term deal in Carolina, he was determined to avoid a repeat of the Guentzel saga. Instead of rolling the dice with Rantanen in the playoffs, Tulsky traded him to Dallas in exchange for promising but unproven forward Logan Stankoven and a pair of conditional first-round picks.
Just over a year later, Stankoven posted 16 playoff points while serving as a key cog in the Hurricanes' championship team. Meanwhile, Rantanen watched the final three rounds of the postseason from home after a disappointing first-round performance.
Logan Stankoven CAR • C • #22 Goals11Assists5Points16 View Profile Between Necas and Rantanen, Tulsky traded away two lethal offensive threats in short order. It took guts -- more than most other general managers have -- but it was a stroke of genius.
Stankoven looks like the newest member of Carolina's core, and the first-round picks Tulsky received from Dallas gave him the freedom to swing for the fences again. Last summer, the Hurricanes used one of those picks to acquire defenseman K'Andre Miller from the Hurricanes to bolster their blue line.
All Miller did in the playoffs was dominate every time he was on the ice. Brind'Amour described him as a "monster" following Game 6, and that was an apt description. Miller posted a 59.6% expected goals shared and a plus-10 goal differential at five-on-five, per Natural Stat Trick, and he's under contract at a reasonable cap hit for the next seven seasons.
A bit of luck
If someone told me on Oct. 1 that Brandon Bussi would backstop the Hurricanes to a Stanley Cup in 2026, my first response would have been, "Who?"
My second response would have been, "You realize he's a minor-league goalie for the Panthers, right?"
Finally, my third response would have been, "No, they won't."
Yet, there was Bussi, tossing off his blocker and glove to greet his Carolina teammates with hugs on the ice at T-Mobile Arena after shutting out the Golden Knights in Game 6. Just the third first-year goaltender in NHL history to post a shutout in a Cup-clinching game, Bussi is a Hurricanes legend after just 43 games at the NHL level.
After years of toiling away in the AHL, Bussi finally made his NHL debut on Oct. 14, when he was too old to qualify for rookie status. Bussi's story is as improbable as they come, and Brind'Amour recognized that while also crediting Bussi for making the absolute most of his opportunity in 2025-26.
"Sometimes you get lucky in sports," Brind'Amour said. "You do have to have that. It was a lucky pick-up that just happened at the right time, and here you go. But that's also the story of people who take care of the opportunity. It didn't just happen. He had to make it happen."
Brandon Bussi CAR • G • #32 GSAA2.49Sv%93.1HDSv%90.6 View Profile Bussi's story is the most obvious example of luck greeting Carolina at just the right time, but there are others. Slavin and young forward Jackson Blake were both selected after pick No. 100 in their respective drafts. The Hurricanes' scouting department deserves a lot of credit there, but look at the hit rate of triple-digit picks in the NHL Draft and tell me there wasn't some degree of luck involved there as well.
After years of dealing with significant injuries in the postseason, the Hurricanes were relatively healthy in 2026. Rolling through the first three rounds in 13 games certainly played a role in that good health, but all it takes is one awkward hit or one shot block in between pads for a player's postseason to end abruptly. Just ask the Colorado Avalanche. Carolina avoided all those landmines this spring with 16 skaters playing in all 19 games and two more playing in at least 17.
Every Stanley Cup champion gets a bit of luck along the way, but that doesn't diminish the achievement. The Hurricanes saw an opportunity to hang another banner, and they weren't going to let it slip away this time.
"I think it was our time," Brind'Amour said. "We weren't going to be denied."
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