Despite lacking statistical superstars, the Carolina Hurricanes are league champions. Discover how relentless work ethic and veteran leadership forged a culture of championship glory.
The Carolina Hurricanes didn't have a single player in the top-20 of league scoring this year.
They didn't have a single goaltender finish with a 0.900 save percentage or higher.
Not a single member of the organization was even a finalist for any end-of-season awards.
Yet in the end, the Carolina Hurricanes are the 2026 Stanley Cup Champions.
So how did they pull it off?
The Foundation
The Hurricanes' success starts from the top.
When Rod Brind'Amour took over this team in 2018, he had a vision.
"I know that there's a way to do it right," Brind'Amour said at that first press conference as head coach. "There's no substitute for just competing consistently and caring about your teammates. That's going to be the message going forward."
Accountability, dependability, good people.
Those were the pillars of the Carolina Hurricanes to Rod Brind'Amour and that never waivered.
And who better embodied what it means to be a Hurricane than Jordan Staal.
The Canes captain is the longest serving member of the team, having been in Raleigh for 14 seasons and this championship been a long time coming for #11.
Staal sets the example every day for the team with his dedication and work ethic and he brings everything he has every day both on and off the ice.
"I'm happy I stuck around," Staal said. "I believed in the culture, I believed in what we were trying to build in Carolina. It's just an amazing feeling to be able to build something like [the Stanley Cup] and to top it all off with this. It's an absolute dream come true."
Much like Staal, Jordan Martinook is another member of the core who has given everything he has to the team.
The alternate captain was the first player that the new regime acquired and he's been invaluable to the team's overall success.
Because if Staal is the heart of the Hurricanes, Martinook is the soul. He brings boundless energy and is a key figure in the locker room and behind the scenes when it comes to creating the relationships and bonds that the team relied on to get them to the ultimate goal.
"I remember the day that we made our first acquisition: Jordan Martinook," Brind'Amour said. "Watching him for eight years, it was the exact same every day and he just brings people into the fight."
Jaccob Slavin is the only defenseman that was around before the Rod Brind'Amour era, but his game has been as steady as it was then as it is now.
It's been an up and down season for the veteran blueliner dealing with injuries, but the way he delivered for Carolina in the final push was Herculean.
The Hurricanes don't reach this point without Slavin and now the veteran blueliner is also part of one of the most exclusive clubs in hockey with both an Olympic gold medal and Stanley Cup in the same calendar year.
Slavin is also a testament to smart drafting and development, as he went from a fourth round selection in 2012 to one of the most impactful players in hockey.
Smart drafting and development is again on display when it comes to a trio of players in 2015, 2018 and 2020 that would become their franchise forwards, ones who are as much a part of the core as they are the future in Sebastian Aho, Andrei Svechnikov and Seth Jarvis.
While it wasn't perhaps the postseason many expected from them, the three have absolutely carried the load for the team for years and they were still big pieces of the playoffs, with each picking up game-winning goals along in the way in both the Eastern Conference and Stanley Cup Final.
Aho has been here almost as long as anybody else, joining the team before Brind'Amour was even the coach and Svechnikov came into the fold just two years after him.
And while Jarvis is just 24 years old, with five NHL seasons already under his belt, he was still one of the longest tenured Hurricanes given the roster turnover, so it's safe to call him a piece of the foundation.
Finding Guys Who Just Fit
While the roster has gone through a good bit of change over the eight year span, the organization has just found players who perfectly complement the team and their systems.
There's perhaps no player who was more fit to be a Carolina Hurricane than Logan Stankoven.
The entire debacle from trading Martin Necas, to landing Mikko Rantanen to then having to pivot and trade him again just months later could have been a franchise altering moment, and it tuned out to be exactly that with the acquisition of Stankoven.
The 23-year-old became the second-line center Carolina had been searching so long for and his line was the Hurricanes best in the postseason.
And if you thought Stankoven was good, well his linemate is almost a carbon copy style of player.
Jackson Blake, yet another fourth round selection that has blossomed into an integral piece of the team, truly was a player who came out of nowhere.
In 2024, nobody thought the undersized college kid was going to have a shot to make the team, but he defied the odds and never looked back.
Now, he's a champion, one who led his entire team in postseason production.
"He's an amazing player, but he also just fits our group," Brind'Amour said. "He's such a good kid. Again, it's a blessing for me. I have an easy job. When you have people like that, with talent like that, it's not that tough."
Oh and both players are signed for the next eight years at a combined price tag below $13 million.
"We're just always looking to get better," said Carolina general manager Eric Tulsky. "It's really just about accumulating as much talent as we can. We try really hard not to be dogmatic about looking specifically for one thing. You don't want to pigeon hole yourself into looking for a specific opportunity and miss out on other players. We're just trying to add talent every time we can."
The Canes' entire fourth line was another integral part of the run that came from identifying the right kinds of players.
Each came to Carolina after being identified by the pro scouting staff for different elements that the team was looking for.
William Carrier was a relentless forechecker and heavy body who brought Stanley Cup pedigree and a physical edge the team needed.
Eric Robinson brought speed and a dependable two-way game.
Mark Jankowski was a jack of all trades, playing in multiple roles, but also being a dependable centerman both in the dot and defensively as well.
But all three were also capable of providing offense too, bringing multiple clutch goals to the table for Carolina.
That depth allowed the Hurricanes to continue rolling lines without worrying too much about matchups or if they were getting enough contributions out of other players.
"Our scouting staff does an incredible job," Tulsky said. "Chris Abbot and Mark Craig lead the group and we've really focused on finding people that fit the way we want to play. We ask players to play a very distinctive style and our scouts have done a great job of finding players who can come in and look their best playing the way Rod needs them to play."
Castoffs
The Hurricanes are also a team that made smart bets on players that were perhaps overlooked by everyone else.
No player was more impactful offensively this postseason than Taylor Hall, a first-overall pick, Hart Trophy winner, yet someone who couldn't find the right fit, jumping between seven different teams across 16 seasons.
However, Carolina saw a player that they still believed in and his hunger and drive fit in perfectly with the team once he got here.
"Him coming over, with the pedigree he had, it could have been easy to be like, 'I'm not doing this,' but he was the opposite," Brind'Amour said. "Just, 'How do I contribute to getting this.' It was a daily thing for him and I think he got better as a player. And just watching him, I don't know if he could have played any better. He was a real special player and he was a big part of what we have just done."
Another piece whose importance cannot be overstated was defenseman K'Andre Miller.
The former New York Ranger took a lot of flak from the organization and fanbase for the way their season went last year, even despite his incredible talent.
He was wrongly blamed for a lot of things and found himself seen as an expendable piece luckily enough for the Hurricanes.
Carolina swung big on him, trading away multiple assets and then signing him to a max-term deal, and it immediately paid dividends, with Miller, who led all skaters in time on ice.
"Fundamentally, we want to be aggressive," said Carolina general manager Eric Tulsky. "When you have a chance to add a really high-end player, we never want to miss out on it or get worried about the what ifs. That being said, sometimes it doesn't go the way you hoped and you have to be ready to figure out how you're going to move forward from there. It's one of the strengths of our organization that we're not afraid to take those swings, but we're also confident if we just keep staying aggressive, some will work out, some won't, but we'll end up ahead of where we would be if we had just stayed passive the whole time."
Nikolaj Ehlers is another such player.
The Danish winger was never quite given the opportunities he felt he deserved in Winnipeg, and so he took his talents to free agency and after weighing his options, he was sold on what Carolina was building.
Ehlers was never a player who was trusted in pivotal moments of the game nor was he seen as someone capable of elevating his game in the playoffs, but he changed everything about the Hurricanes' offense.
The dynamic skater had a career regular season and then followed it up by producing at a point-per-game pace in the playoffs.
Seems like he was in fact good enough.
Shayne Gostisbehere is another player whose career seemed to be going in the wrong direction after getting booted from Philadelphia, but the Canes took a swing on him in 2023, acquiring him at the trade deadline that year, and then circled back on him again in 2024.
Their commitment paid off as Gostisbehere rebounded tremendously, becoming the Hurricanes' PP1 quarterback on top of rounding out his entire defensive game as well.
In total, the blueline consisted of a lot of guys with things to prove.
Both Jalen Chatfield and Sean Walker were undrafted free agents, who carved their own paths, becoming important top-four players on a Cup winning roster.
"Obviously we have the guys that were drafted here and the guys that have been here for a long time, but there's also a few of us that played for multiple teams and we've come here and kind of played a lot better and had bigger roles than we have other places and I think we take pride in that," Hall said.
Rounding out the blueline was Alexander Nikishin, a blue chip prospect that is still learning the North American game, but has loads of talent that could soon seem him as a top option in Carolina.
And even though they didn't come in at all during the postseason, there's also the case of Joel Nystrom and Charles Alexis Legault who helped keep the team afloat in the midst of their myriad of defensive injuries.
If the Hurricanes don't secure every win they did, they may not finish at the top of the East and things may have played out differently. Just goes to show that drafting and development matters and everybody can make a difference along the way.
Goalies
I'd be remiss not to mention the goaltenders, but everyone knows how hard goaltending is to get a read on.
However, the Hurricanes deserve a lot of credit for their commitment to both carrying three netminders (how crucial was that in the end, huh?) and believing in their guys.
Frederik Andersen has played a lot of hockey and his body hasn't always been compliant, with the Dane having dealt with many an injury, but he's fought tooth and nail to continue to be in the position to compete.
And even despite a career worst regular season, the team believed in him and tossed him the keys for Game 1 and he repaid that faith with a tremendous postseason run, picking up 13 of the 16 wins the team needed.
And once injuries took him out of the lineup, in came Brandon Bussi, one of the league's best stories.
The 27-year-old rookie netminder had never even sniffed the NHL, but one waiver claim changed everything for both him and Carolina, ultimately ending in Bussi leading the team to the Stanley Cup.
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