Can Hurricanes’ Brandon Bussi get the job done during playoffs?
The Carolina Hurricanes are heading to the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the eighth season in a row, and they’re desperate to get over the hump and make the Stanley Cup Final for the first time since head coach Rod Brind’Amour captained them to the Cup in 2006.
If they’re going to do it, the Hurricanes will need goaltender Brandon Bussi to rise to the occasion. It’s likely that Carolina will need both veteran Frederik Andersen and Bussi to win them games throughout the run, but the upside Bussi has flashed throughout the season makes him the likely candidate to be the primary guy in any successful scenario.
The Long Island native is 28-6-1 in his first NHL season with a 2.44 goals against average and .897 save percentage, and he’s set several records for being the fastest goalie in NHL history to reach several separate win totals.
But ever since signing a three-year contract extension during the Olympic break, Bussi has struggled. He may have found some momentum in a win over Columbus on Tuesday, but prior to that, he had a save percentage below .900 in seven straight games.
On Thursday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, host Tyler Yaremchuk and co-host and former NHL goaltender Carter Hutton discussed why it is imperative for Carolina that Bussi recapture his early-season form in the playoffs in order to achieve the ultimate goal, and why he may not be quite up to the task just yet.
Tyler Yaremchuk: Hutts I wanted to ask you with, kind of doing a vote of confidence ranking, on a number of goalies, and the way we’re doing it is the inexperienced guys who should be getting playoff games this year. So you’ve got UPL in Buffalo, Lukas Dostal in Anaheim, Brandon Bussi in Carolina, Jakub Dobes… in Montreal, Silovs in Pittsburgh, Jet Greaves in Columbus, and Vejmelka in Utah… Again, a bunch of these guys, it’s going to be a great kind of learning moment… But is there anyone in that list I gave you who you look out with a bit of a crooked eyebrow and go like, I don’t know if they’re going to be able to handle it, come playoff time?
Carter Hutton: The guy that I’m worried about is Brandon Bussi. I just don’t know if the flame is burning out a little bit when I think of Brandon Bussi, and I think about the lack of offense. There’s a lot of games where I look at his numbers, you know, they’re not unbelievable. He’s buzzing at league average. So you see the highlights of the wins, right? 28-6-1, there’s a lot of nights where he was giving up three or four and they were scoring their way out of troubles, which Carolina has always struggled doing come playoff time, so that is my concern. Now the pressure of him trying to be perfect on a team that doesn’t have that game breaking player is going to be a bit daunting. And he hasn’t had a great run here down since the Olympic break, since the contract extension. There’s a lot of pressure on him. And we all know that Freddie Andersen doesn’t have playoff success, but he alsodoesn’t have age on his side anymore, as well. So I think the pressure is clearly on Brandon Bussi in a conference, in a division where Carolina is expected to make the Eastern Conference Final at worst. I think it’s going to be a little bit too much weight for his shoulders.
You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here…