Hurricanes win Stanley Cup for first time since 2006, finish off dominant 16-3 playoff run

LAS VEGAS – The day before the Carolina Hurricanes reached the NHL’s summit, their coach reflected on the climb.

After years of progress and setbacks, growth and stagnation, minor tweaks and wholesale changes, Carolina’s moment arrived Sunday at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. Coach Rod Brind’Amour’s team is a champion now, in the realest, fullest sense of the term, beating the Vegas Golden Knights 3-0 in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final to finish off a dominant 16-3 postseason run.

For years, the Hurricanes operated on parallel tracks, largely following regular-season dominance with late-stage playoff disappointment, earning admiration for a remarkably high floor and prompting questions over whether they’d bumped a ceiling that wasn’t quite high enough.

We have our answer. Carolina’s players, coaching staff and front office never doubted that their validation would come and that their process was sound. On Saturday, in some of his final moments as a coach without a Stanley Cup victory, Brind’Amour reinforced it all one last time.

“I know what works,” he said. “I know we didn’t win, and we haven’t won yet, and all that. I get it. And that’s our goal, of course. But I know what doesn’t work. I know if we play a different way, we’re not going to be even knocking on the door.”

On Sunday, the Hurricanes knocked it down – and they did it their way, after nearly a decade spent staying true to a bone-deep, fundamental belief that their method of doing business could work on the grandest scale, even as meaningful chunks of the hockey world had begun to wonder.

Three times between 2019 and 2025 the Hurricanes advanced to the Eastern Conference final. Three times – owing to some combination of bad luck and a lack of a finishing kick – they lost.

Their roster remains one built around the chosen style of Brind’Amour, their coach the past eight seasons and former captain. Carolina plays with relentless pressure, tireless forechecking, aggressive defensive play and limitless belief. Every NHL team holds similar values. Few match the Hurricanes’ level of dedication to the cause.

The 2025-26 version had its foundational pieces: Jordan Staal, the 37-year-old captain, Brind’Amour proxy and all-situations war horse; Jaccob Slavin, a top-pair defenseman and a savant of positional hockey; Sebastian Aho and Andrei Svechnikov, first-line talents tasked at times with sublimating their offensive gifts in pursuit of the greater good; Seth Jarvis, a three-time 30-goal scorer, lab-built for Brind’Amour’s system. All were Carolina draft picks, save for Staal, who’s been with the organization since 2012.

The group also had late-stage additions: Logan Stankoven, their 5-foot-8 leading playoff goal-scorer and a long-sought impact center on the second line; Nikolaj Ehlers, a dynamic force at five-on-five and on the power play; K’Andre Miller, a supremely talented defenseman identified by Carolina’s front office and unlocked by its coaching staff.

All three were added at the 2025 trade deadline or later. Stankoven was general manager Eric Tulsky’s primary return for Mikko Rantanen, a superstar winger acquired in January 2025 and flipped weeks later to the Dallas Stars. Tulsky acquired Miller from the New York Rangers, in part, with the first-round pick he added as part of the Rantanen shuffle. Ehlers signed in free agency, taking a portion of the money that would’ve been earmarked for a contract Rantanen chose not to sign.

The end result is a lineup without a top-10 player but with talent infused throughout – a strength-in-numbers approach taken to its logical end. Goaltender Brandon Bussi, who started three of Carolina’s wins in the Final and made 22 saves for the shutout in Game 6, was a waiver-wire find ahead of the season. Shayne Gostisbehere produced nearly a point per game in 2025-26 as a $3.2 million power-play quarterback. The list goes on.

That they beat a Western Conference champion with Cup-winning DNA dating back to the 2017 expansion draft was fitting.

“There were the Golden Misfits here a few years ago, and they were all guys that were kind of cast-offs. Our team kind of feels similar,” Hurricanes forward Taylor Hall said on Sunday.

“Obviously, we have the guys that they’ve drafted here and guys that have been here for a long time,” Hall said, “but there’s also a few of us that played for multiple teams, and we’ve come here and played a lot better, had bigger roles than we had other places, and I think we take pride in that.”

Hall would know. The No. 1 pick in 2010 and NHL MVP in 2016, he has also played for seven separate franchises and joined Carolina as yet another piece of the second Rantanen trade.

On Sunday, he scored Carolina’s first goal, his 19th point of the postseason. In the Hurricanes’ four series-clinching games overall, he had a franchise-record three goals and nine points. He also set a franchise record with 11 points in nine road games. What Hall represents, writ large, is something previous versions of the Hurricanes lacked: elite sheen, a player equally capable of finishing at a high level and finding teammates in what Tulsky called “premium ice.”

The teammates Hall most frequently found over the course of the season, Stankoven and Jackson Blake, combined on Carolina’s second goal with six minutes, 29 seconds remaining in the second period. Stankoven earned zone time with a relentless forechecking sequence and found Blake at the top of the circles for his seventh goal of the playoffs, redirected off Vegas winger Mitch Marner past goaltender Carter Hart.

Ehlers capped the scoring with an empty-netter.

Bussi, who came on for Frederik Andersen in the third period of Game 3, finished the final with 81 saves on 87 shots despite going two months between starts. The 27-year-old, who played ECHL games as recently as three seasons ago and was only making his 43rd NHL appearance, was especially sharp late in the first period, helping preserve a 1-0 lead as the Golden Knights pressed, including making a sprawling, chest-first save to rob sharp-shooter Pavel Dorofeyev on a power play. In the third, with Vegas’ net empty, he robbed Tomas Hertl while sitting on his bottom.

Carolina’s final goal, an empty-netter with 1:08 left, was scored by Ehlers, a player who spent the season blending high-end skill with a do-anything mentality that made him a seamless, additive fit on Staal’s wing and helped Carolina add a third scoring line to its mix.

It’s the second championship for the Hurricanes, who relocated from Hartford in 1997. Brind’Amour, fittingly, captained Carolina to its previous Cup win in 2006. A banner of him hoisting the Cup is one of many lining the tunnels of T-Mobile Arena right now, hung by the NHL to commemorate the occasion. At the next Cup Final, wherever it’s held, there will be a similar shot of Staal, at a summit of his own.