The Stanley Cup Champions lost a solid veteran goaltender in the summer and didn't replace him despite having a ton of cap space. How viable is that strategy?
You could say that the Carolina Hurricanes have reason to be confident in their decision-making processes.
They won the Stanley Cup just a year after the brief Mikko Rantanen affair, and almost every other personnel decision they've made in the last few years has worked out reasonably well at a bare minimum.
But their recent decision to let veteran goalie Frederik Andersen walk in free agency, and not replace him with another veteran, certainly raises eyebrows.
Instead, they seem poised to roll with a tandem of Stanley Cup hero Brandon Bussi and backup Pyotr Kochetkov for their championship defense season. The question is whether that's a good idea.
Bussi may have been excellent in the Stanley Cup Final, going 3-1 with a .931 save percentage after Andersen's knee injury limited his availability and effectiveness, but he only played 39 games of serviceable regular-season hockey as a rookie last year.
Kochetkov has 125 NHL games under his belt, and has mostly been slightly above average, but also served as Carolina's third-string goaltender and missed most of the season with injury.
However, the thing you can't ignore with this is that Andersen was just not a guy they could reasonably bring back, given his age and injury history (it's already announced that he's going to miss training camp for the Edmonton Oilers).
Considering the other options out there in free agency and trade market, making any notable signing would have carried a significant risk of that guy, whomever it happened to be, just not-living up to his contract.
Would you feel better about the Hurricanes' chances if they had Sergei Bobrovsky, who is coming off a rotten season at age 37, or Stuart Skinner, now with his third team in just a few months? Not especially, right? And they'd have to give up money to get those guys, or assets to get an option like Jacob Markstrom. None of those options are worth pursuing.
The other thing to keep in mind here is that the Hurricanes routinely put their goaltenders in a position to succeed, no matter who it is. Bussi, famously, is just five years removed from working at a Boston-area Chipotle, and is now the fairly definitive No. 1 starter for the Hurricanes.
That's a really great glow-up for a goalie who worked hard at every level, but you have to think he would have doubted this kind of career trajectory. Kochetkov has long felt like a he'll-figure-out project, but has also put together a couple of totally serviceable seasons when he's been given the ball (2023-24 and 2024-25).
Plus, playing under coach Rod Brind'Amour with a highly regimented 200-foot system, the Hurricanes' goaltenders have failed to beat their Expected-Goals Against (GSAx) number just once in the last six seasons.
That down year was last year, but A) They famously won the Stanley Cup after running away with their Eastern Conference regular season, B) they lost a ton of goaltender man-games to injury, and C) their GSAx was still only minus-0.89 according to Money Puck.
Despite the challenges, their negative outings — if you choose to call it that — were borderline negligible and didn't affect team performance.
The Hurricanes' xGA total was fifth in the league last year, so falling less than a goal short of that still means they got elite defensive results. That's the reliable part; the last time Carolina wasn't top-10 in the league in xGA for the full season was 2015-16 according to NaturalStatTrick. If that's not repeatability, nothing is.
On top of all that, you have to also understand that Carolina has nearly $10 million in cap space right now and a ton of assets that they can leverage, should it become evident they need more help in net.
Any team that suddenly wants to move a goalie can probably expect a call from GM Eric Tulsky, who's shown he's not afraid to swing for the fences. And to that point, if you're really, truly worried about the Bussi/Kochetkov tandem, I think I heard something about a star goalie asking for a trade to a competitive American team recently.
Carolina, in theory, could bring Connor Hellebuyck in from the Winnipeg Jets with no NHL talent going the other direction, and still be almost $1.5 million under the cap ceiling.
Even beyond that, have a look at the Metropolitan Division and try to talk yourself into three teams finishing ahead of even a Carolina team getting notably below-average goaltending. It's frankly tough to square that expectation.
While it's easy to see why a Bussi-Kochetkov tandem introduces risk, the number of safeguards they seem to have in place makes things much more understandable.
From the reassurance of past performance from those players, the coach's system, their cap space, to the quality of their division and arguably entire Eastern Conference. It's probably going to be fine. Even if it does require a pivot.
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