By STEPHEN WHYNO AP Hockey Writer
RALEIGH, N.C. — Rod Brind’Amour knows the exact moment he realized the Carolina Hurricanes could be Stanley Cup contenders.
“Eight years ago,” he said. That was when Brind’Amour took over as coach, beginning a journey of making the playoffs every year and falling short of the Final each time until now.
The Vegas Golden Knights were born nine years ago, but from the time they pillaged the rest of the NHL in the expansion draft through this spring, they have set championship expectations. They made the Final in their inaugural season and won it all in 2023. Their third visit to the Cup Final is perhaps their most surprising.
This Vegas-Carolina series is almost a decade in the making for a pair of teams in non-traditional markets that have become powerhouses. The collision course brought them to this moment, a best-of-seven series that begins with Game 1 on Tuesday night.
“It’s for all the marbles,” Golden Knights forward Cole Smith said. “Just the way they play, they play a really fast game. So do we. It’s going to be a really great series.”
Brind’Amour has been a Carolina constant
The Hurricanes won their only Stanley Cup championship in 2006, when Brind’Amour was their captain. He played 9½ seasons for them and spent seven more as an assistant before getting named coach in 2018. He has been a part of 98 of Carolina’s 100 playoff victories since the franchise formerly known as the Whalers moved from Hartford in ’97.
“Roddy’s been at the helm of it the whole time and just establishing the culture that we do have here,” said defenseman Jaccob Slavin, now in his 11th season with the team. “It’s been building and building and we’ve been close and knocking at the door. I think we finally just have the right personnel, the right commitment, the right buy-in because our game really hasn’t changed.”
Slavin, captain Jordan Staal, grinder Jordan Martinook and center Sebastian Aho have been together since the time Brind’Amour was promoted, and wingers Andrei Svechnikov and Seth Jarvis and goaltender Frederik Andersen got added to the well-established core along the way. The Hurricanes won at least one series every year but had never strung together three in a row.
“We’ve been trying really hard for eight years, and it’s not anybody’s fault,” Martinook said. “It’s just we’ve fallen short.”
What has been different for the Hurricanes
Logan Stankoven, acquired at the trade deadline last year when Mikko Rantanen was sent to Dallas six weeks after Carolina got him from Colorado, has thrived at center on the second line between Taylor Hall and Jackson Blake. Stankoven leads the team with nine goals.
Hall, who came from Chicago in that initial three-way trade with Rantanen, tops the Hurricanes with 16 points. Nikolaj Ehlers, signed last summer as a free agent, had a monster Game 2 of the East final after they lost the series opener, including scoring the overtime winner.
“I don’t think I’ve done anything special to get this group (here),” Ehlers said. “This group was ready for it.”
Carolina is 12-1 this playoffs, the fewest losses to get to the final since 1983. Brind’Amour feels like this is where his team has belonged for a long time but still has unfinished business.
“I don’t think we have broken through,” Brind’Amour said. “You’ve got to win. I know everyone makes a lot about getting this far, but nobody’s going to remember who comes in second.”
The Golden Knights were winners from the start
Vegas came in second during its inaugural season when no one expected the expansion team to be any good. The Golden Knights went all the way to the final before losing to Washington in five games.
“Set the tone right away,” said center William Karlsson, one of the three original so-called “Misfits” who are still around from the beginning. “That came out of nowhere.”
First, General Manager George McPhee plucking Karlsson, defensemen Shea Theodore and Brayden McNabb and winger Reilly Smith – back after a year and a half absence – from other teams put Vegas in position to succeed. Smart selections in the draft, free agent signings and trades by McPhee and now-GM Kelly McCrimmon established a standard of winning at all costs.
“It’s what you want to be as an athlete,” McNabb said. “You want to be on a team that does that.”
In came Mark Stone, Jack Eichel, Ivan Barbashev and Alex Pietrangelo, and the Knights won the Cup in their sixth season. They’ve only missed the playoffs once.
What has been different for the Golden Knights
Pietrangelo’s career-ending injury opened space to deal for Mitch Marner on June 30. Marner leads all scorers in the playoffs with 21 points, succeeding at a time of year when he never did in nearly a decade with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
“I think our team is deeper and a better team than what he had played on in Toronto,” McCrimmon said. “Not that Toronto didn’t have real good teams, but you have to have that depth throughout your roster because to go through three rounds or ultimately, hopefully, four rounds, everybody’s got to take their turn.”
Pavel Dorofeyev has been a breakout star on that front, and he and teammate Brett Howden are tied for the most postseason goals with 10 apiece. Karlsson returned in the second round after missing the previous six months with an undisclosed injury.
Goaltender Carter Hart, a controversial signing last fall after he and four other Hockey Canada junior players were acquitted of sexual assault, has rounded into form. Hart stopped 118 of 125 shots in a Western Conference final sweep of Colorado.
And, most notably, Vegas has won 19 of 24 games since McCrimmon fired Coach Bruce Cassidy in late March and hired John Tortorella, whom he had never met or spoken with before.
“We asked ourselves, ‘Who can come in and give us that kind of a bump?’” McCrimmon said. “John was the guy that we really felt strongly could do that.”
Both teams are hyper-defense-focused
The Hurricanes opened the playoffs with a shutout and just kept smothering opponents, swarming in absolute refusal to yield time or space to puck handlers.
The Golden Knights simply got better with each round until locking up the Presidents’ Trophy-winning Avalanche in a shocking sweep of a team that romped through the regular season.
Now they turn their lockdown sights on each other for the chance to hoist the Stanley Cup.
“It’s the Stanley Cup Final, it’s going to be a defense-first game,” Vegas defenseman Dylan Coghlan said Monday. “If you don’t have that mentality, then it’s not going to go in your favor.”
The best-of-seven series pairs an Eastern Conference champion that finished second in the regular season behind Colorado against a Western Conference champion that has elevated its game the longer the playoffs wore on.
Sure, offense captures fan imagination with plays like Vegas’ Marner scoring on a between-the-legs breakaway goal against the Ducks or the net-finding heat coming off Carolina’s Stankoven-centered second line featuring Hall and Blake line since the playoffs started in April.
But these are teams that take just as much joy in grinding opposing offenses into the ice, whether its pressuring relentlessly to win puck battles along the boards or selling out in a desperate attempt to block shots. Goaltenders Andersen and Hart have been steady in net, helped by the supreme efforts going on in front of them.
Vegas has allowed just 10 goals in its last six games as it chases a second championship in four seasons. The Hurricanes have given up two or fewer goals in 12 of 13 playoff games, back in the final for the first time since winning it in 2006.
“I think we’re just kind of all on the same page right now,” Hurricanes defenseman Sean Walker said. “It’s a team effort to be so solid defensively. We’re definitely aggressive, but it’s full five-man effort.”
The Golden Knights took off after the late-season coaching change, but there were also March trade moves to add forwards Cole Smith and Nic Dowd to bolster the fourth line by getting bigger and stronger while also helping the penalty kill. They battled through six-game series against both Utah and the Ducks before taking on the Avs, led by high-end skill in Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar and Martin Necas.
The Avalanche led the NHL by averaging 3.63 goals per game in the regular season. But the Golden Knights gave up nothing easy and never let the high-flying Avs find a sweet-skating groove. The Avs managed just seven goals in four games.
“I just think as a five-man unit, when you’re playing MacKinnon and Necas, some really high-skilled players, it can’t be one-on-one situations, it’s not one guy to get it done,” Theodore said. “It’s making sure guys are back, making sure you’re playing the right way.”
The Hurricanes are 12-1 in the playoffs, sweeping both Ottawa and Philadelphia while allowing just five goals in each of those two rounds. Then came a 6-2 loss to Montreal in Game 1 of the conference final, a result that in hindsight turned out to be a blip for a team coming off the longest between-rounds playoff break in more than a century.
That performance left Brind’Amour befuddled with Carolina’s aggressive-forechecking style repeatedly surrendering clean breakouts and multiple breakaways with the Canadiens skating unchecked through the neutral zone. Brind’Amour didn’t have the team practice the next day, opting instead to go over the film of all those breakdowns.
Carolina responded by allowing just five goals in the four consecutive wins that followed – the last two coming by a 10-1 combined score.
“It was just understanding where our lapses were and obviously video doesn’t lie,” Slavin said. “Sometimes you can really nitpick stuff on video, but it was pretty obvious what our lapses were in that game. So really it was just making sure we were staying above the puck, making sure that we were forechecking the right way.
“Everyone has their own job to do while they’re out there, but we work as a five-man unit, so making sure you’re doing your job. And that’s what I think you saw moving forward.”
AP sports writer Aaron Beard contributed to this story.