The Hurricanes’ patience finally paid off
The Carolina Hurricanes are Stanley Cup champions, an achievement that had been eight years in the making under head coach Rod Brind’Amour.
The Hurricanes were ousted from the Stanley Cup Playoffs in each of the seven prior years under Brind’Amour, notably underachieving in a couple of them and posting a 1-12 record in the Eastern Conference Final.
Rather than overreact to individual series losses, Brind’Amour and general manager Eric Tulsky continued to believe in their approach and philosophies and that eventually, if the team remained elite for long enough, eventually the postseason would break their way.
On Monday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, host Tyler Yaremchuk and co-host and former NHL defenseman Colby Cohen were joined by NHL insider David Pagnotta to discuss how Carolina’s belief in its approach to roster building and coaching system enabled the group to finally break through on the biggest stage.
Tyler Yaremchuk: I know there were some people trying to be detractors yesterday, being like ‘Well, they didn’t have to go through a Tampa or a Florida,’ or a blah or a blah or a blah. And I sit there and go, they lost three games over four rounds to win the Stanley Cup. Like, I don’t care if you’re playing the bottom three teams in the NHL. Going 16-3 over any stretch is insane, especially when they’re a best-of-7 series, and that kind of circles back to like, again Carolina’s approach here all along. Granted, for the last number of years, people kind of clowned on them for it, but their approach was to keep running it back with solid teams. We’re never really going to overreact, and then eventually the path’s just going to break our way.
David Pagnotta: I was highly critical of them over the years for two things. One was goaltending, and two was the additional offense. I like the system. I will say, what this Final and what Vegas exposed in Carolina’s game is that some of their defensemen are not as good as we thought they were, but the system that works for this group really, really works. And we need to give Roddy Brind’Amour probably more props for inputting this system that works with all these guys. Yes, there’s the physical aspect of making sure you’re in shape, and consistently in shape. I think it was Shayne Gostisbehere that talked about how important it was, how their workout regiment was… all of that element to it… The system itself just works, so when you’ve got guys that may have a visibly bad game on defense, like Walker one night, Chatfield another night. Overall it still works for them because the system just complements the crap out of this team.
You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode below…