Everything finally fell into place for the Carolina Hurricanes
Here's how Carolina finally got over the hump
It took eight tries, but the Carolina Hurricanes finally got over the hump.
Carolina silenced its doubters after years of underachieving in the playoffs by blanking the Golden Knights in Vegas in Game 6 and claimed its second Stanley Cup in franchise history. Every year, people come up with what other teams should take away from that year’s champion, and it’s pretty simple with the Hurricanes: Stick to the plan.
If you have a hockey team that consistently wins games and has excellent underlying numbers but struggles to put it together in the playoffs, just keep trying. I’ve written about this a couple of times, but what the Hurricanes did this year was not anything new. They posted an expected goals share in the regular season above 55 percent for the fourth straight year (and were at 54.9 percent the year before that) and accrued over 110 points for the fourth time in five years as well. They were still the team that lacked a superstar and had questionable goaltending and suspect finishing at times.
Sure, there were some differences in the personnel. Budding young stars Jackson Blake and Logan Stankoven were a year older this year, and offseason additions Nikolaj Ehlers and K’Andre Miller gave Carolina some more firepower and defensive depth, respectively. But on the whole, this team profiled exactly like the Hurricanes squads that came before them.
The big change for Carolina was that it simply got the bounces when it needed them the most. After years of brutal puck luck in the postseason, the Hurricanes were finally blessed by the hockey gods.
It’s an unsatisfying conclusion because there’s no way to earn good puck luck. Hockey isn’t always a meritocracy. Sometimes, if you’re the Avalanche, key players get hurt at the wrong time, and an all-time great regular season amounts to a loss in the conference finals. Sometimes, like so many Carolina teams in recent years, you just get “goalied.” It happens, and the variance of hockey is what makes it so unpredictable and chaotic.
But sometimes, it all comes together and everything just goes your way. Most of the time, if you leave Mark Stone and Jack Eichel all alone down low right in front of the goal on the power play, you’re going to get scored on. But on Sunday, Eichel hit the crossbar, and the Golden Knights never found the back of the net.
The way that puck luck is usually measured is through PDO, which is a combination of a team’s on-ice shooting and save percentages. The average is roughly 100. Stanley Cup winners tend to have a pretty high PDO at five-on-five in the playoffs because so much has to go your way to win one in the first place, like having a hot goalie or shooting percentage heater. When Vegas won it all in 2023, it was at an unbelievably high 106.5. The 2011 Bruins, with Tim Thomas doing his best brick wall impression, had a 104.8. The 2025 Panthers were at 104.3, and the list goes on.
For years, the Hurricanes never had anywhere near that kind of puck luck. Prior to this year, Carolina had a PDO below 100 in four of its last five trips to the playoffs. This year, Carolina finished the playoffs with a 101.6 PDO at five-on-five, thanks to a 10 percent shooting percentage. In its previous five playoff runs, Carolina had shot 7.3 percent or lower in all of them. The scary part: Carolina’s finishing this year was actually right in line with its expected goals.
In previous years, Carolina came up short against a pair of recent dynasties, falling to Tampa Bay in 2021 and Florida in 2023 and 2025 (both in the conference finals). This time, Carolina was the dominant force, finishing the playoffs with a 16-3 record.
Likewise, partially because of the Hurricanes actually scoring goals, they were never in danger of getting goalied like some of the Carolina teams of the past. There wasn’t an Igor Shesterkin to steal a series from Carolina like in 2022 and 2024 or Sergei Bobrovsky in 2023. When the Panthers swept Carolina in the 2023 Eastern Conference Finals, Carolina had more than 60 percent of the expected goals at five-on-five, but the Hurricanes scored just four goals on 11.5 expected.
The closest Carolina came to getting stymied by a white-hot goaltender once again came in the Eastern Conference Finals against Montreal. After coming out flat in Game 1 after having nearly two weeks off, Carolina tied the series up with an overtime win and thoroughly dominated the series the rest of the way that it didn’t matter how well Montreal goaltender Jakub Dobes played.
Game 3 somehow needed overtime despite Carolina owning 75.5 percent of the expected goals at five-on-five, but after Andrei Svechnikov buried the game-winning goal, it was all over for Montreal. The next two games were more of a formality than anything else. Carolina had an 84 percent expected goal share at five-on-five in a Game 4 win before unceremoniously sending Montreal packing in similar fashion in Game 5. Carolina’s 66.8 percent expected goals share in the series is the highest in a best-of-seven series since the analytics era started in 2007-08.
To win the Stanley Cup, you also need heroes, like Jordan Staal out of nowhere scoring a goal in five straight games to start his first Stanley Cup Final in 17 years. In true Hurricanes fashion, they had a bunch of them.
Frederik Andersen was really only as good as the defense in front of him in the regular season (0.71 Goals Saved Above Expected), but he turned it on in the playoffs. Through three rounds, Andersen had a GSAx of 12.5, which trailed only the superhuman efforts of Dobes. When Brandon Bussi, a waiver claim at the beginning of the season, took over in between the pipes for the final three games of the Stanley Cup Final, he was just as good. Between the three starts and relieving Andersen in Game 3, Bussi saved 4.5 goals above expected to help the Hurricanes right the ship and capture the Stanley Cup.
Carolina also had a lethal second line of Blake, Taylor Hall and Stankoven. Putting those three together was the perfect embodiment of this Carolina team, as it was both constantly dangerous and a reminder of how savvy the Hurricanes’ front office was when putting this team together. Blake was a former fourth-round pick, Hall was seemingly a throw-in when Carolina acquired him as part of the first Mikko Rantanen trade and Stankoven was the centerpiece of the return Carolina received when it flipped Rantanen to Dallas.
Blake led the Hurricanes in points with 20, with Hall right behind him at 19. Together, that line finished the playoffs with a 68.2 percent expected goal share while outscoring the opposition 18-7, per Natural Stat Trick.
For a team that has contended as long as Carolina has, the Hurricanes are set up to be this good for years to come. Sebastian Aho is Carolina’s highest-paid player at just $9.75 million, and he’s locked up through 2032. Ehlers, Seth Jarvis, Stankoven, Blake, Miller and Jaccob Slavin all have at least five years left on their current deals. The only important pending free agent this year is Alexander Nikishin, and he’s only a restricted free agent. The only thing scarier than a Stanley Cup champion is a defending Stanley Cup champion with over $12 million in cap space and almost an entire team under contract.
Carolina was due to finally break through after icing contending teams year after year. “The same old Hurricanes” saying is dead. A lot has to go your way to capture a Stanley Cup, and it all finally came together for Carolina.
All stats are from Hockey Stats unless otherwise noted