To be honest, a lot of air went out of the Stanley Cup playoffs when the Montreal Canadiens were eliminated last Friday. Love ’em or hate ’em, the Habs were a major driver of interest as an Original Six team with an extremely passionate fan base trying to end Canada’s decades-long NHL championship drought.
Having said that, we still ended up with a pretty good matchup between the Vegas Golden Knights and the Carolina Hurricanes, who open the best-of-seven Cup final on Tuesday.
Here’s a primer on the two teams and some of the interesting storylines to watch.
The Hurricanes have taken the league by storm.
In part because they play in a non-traditional hockey market, and also because of their reputation for flaming out in the second or third round of the playoffs, many hockey fans were reluctant to buy into the ‘Canes this year. But even their biggest critics must now admit they’re the real deal.
After finishing second in the overall regular-season standings and earning the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference, Carolina has gone an incredible 12-1 in the playoffs, becoming the first team to reach the Stanley Cup final with fewer than two losses since the NHL made all four rounds a best-of-seven in 1987.
The Hurricanes’ only loss came in Game 1 of the Eastern final against Montreal, when they were coming off an 11-day layoff following their sweeps of Ottawa and Philadelphia. They rebounded with back-to-back overtime wins over the Canadiens before dominating the last two games by a combined score of 10-1 to reach the franchise’s first Cup final since 2006, when a seven-game victory over Edmonton gave Carolina its first championship.
This time, the Hurricanes are slight favourites over the Golden Knights, with the current betting odds implying Carolina has about a 58 per cent chance of hoisting the Cup.
Vegas is on a heater too.
The Golden Knights are the gold standard for modern expansion franchises. They shocked the sports world by reaching the Cup final in their inaugural season in 2018, captured their first championship five years later, and are now back in the final for the third time in their nine seasons of existence.
As recently as late March, though, Vegas seemed on the verge of going bust. With eight games left in the regular season, the Golden Knights were tied for 23rd in the league in regulation wins and sat third in the pillowy-soft Pacific Division, just four points from being out of the playoff picture.
That’s when general manager Kelly McCrimmon decided to roll the dice, firing head coach Bruce Cassidy, who led Vegas to its Stanley Cup victory in 2023, and replacing him with cantankerous 67-year-old John Tortorella, who was working as an analyst for ESPN after being fired by Philly almost exactly a year earlier.
The Torts reform worked like a charm as Vegas went 7-0-1 down the stretch to win the Pacific before defeating Utah and Anaheim in six games each. That led to a stunning Western Conference final sweep of Presidents’ Trophy-winning Colorado, which was weakened by injuries to stars Cale Makar and Nathan MacKinnon.
Vegas is just the third team ever to reach the final after changing its head coach in the final 10 games of the regular season, and the first since Larry Robinson guided New Jersey to a Stanley Cup victory in 2000. Tortorella’s only previous trip to the final came back in 2004, when he led Tampa Bay to the title. His 22-year gap between Cup final appearances is the longest ever for an NHL head coach.
In Rod we trust.
Carolina also has a formidable presence behind the bench in 55-year-old Rod Brind’Amour. “Rod the Bod,” as the muscular two-way centre was known during his 20-year playing career, captained Carolina to its Stanley Cup victory in 2006, scoring 12 goals in 25 playoff games.
Brind’Amour retired in 2010 after a decade with the Hurricanes, and they went on to miss the playoffs every year until he took over as head coach for the 2018-19 season. They’ve made it in all eight years with Brind’Amour at the helm, including four trips to the conference finals, and he now has a chance to become the first man since Toe Blake in 1956 with Montreal to win the Cup as both a player and a head coach with the same franchise.
Brind’Amour, a two-time Selke Trophy winner as the NHL’s top defensive forward, has put his stamp on the Hurricanes, who give their opponents no quarter anywhere on the ice. They suffocate puck carriers with relentless pressure and exhaust goalies with a ton of shots from all different angles.
Mitch Marner is thriving.
The highly skilled forward spent his first nine NHL seasons playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs, his hometown team. Despite some excellent regular seasons, the Leafs never made it past the second round of the playoffs, and Marner (at times fairly) took a lot of heat for their failures. On the first day of free agency last summer, he approved a sign-and-trade deal with Vegas that gave him a new eight-year, $98-million US contract and a much-needed change of scenery.
Marner didn’t exactly light it up in his first season with the Golden Knights, recording 24 goals and 80 points in 81 games after notching 27 goals and a career-high 102 points in his final season with the Leafs. But he’s raised his game in the playoffs, piling up 21 points in 16 games (a 107-point pace) to lead all scorers.
Jack Eichel, the top scorer in the playoffs when Vegas won the Cup in 2023, ranks second with 18 points while Vegas forwards Pavel Dorofeyev and Brett Howden are tied for the goals lead with 10 apiece. Goalie Carter Hart, who joined the Golden Knights in late November after the NHL reinstated him following his acquital in the high-profile Hockey Canada sexual assault case, has gone 12-4 in the playoffs with an excellent .924 save percentage.
Taylor Hall is turning back the clock.
It’s not fair to call the former No. 1 overall draft pick a bust, but Hall never really lived up to the hype and has devolved into a journeyman since winning the Hart Trophy as NHL MVP in 2018 with a career-best 39 goals and 93 points with New Jersey. Carolina, where he’s spent the last season and a half, is the seventh stop in a 16-year career that began with Edmonton in 2010 and hasn’t included much post-season success. This is the 34-year-old’s first trip to the Stanley Cup final, and it comes after 1,056 games in the regular season and playoffs. Among No. 1 overall draft picks, only Joe Thornton, Dale Hawerchuk and Alex Ovechkin took longer.
But give the man his due, because Hall is playing some outstanding hockey right now. After recording a modest 18 goals and 48 points in 80 regular-season games, he leads all Hurricanes and ranks third overall with 16 points (14 of them at even strength) in the playoffs. Hall’s five goals include his first career playoff OT winner in the second round against Philly.
Hall and his fellow second-liners Jackson Blake (15 points) and Logan Stankoven (12) have picked up the slack for the quiet top line of Sebastian Aho, Andrei Svechnikov and Seth Jarvis, who are averaging only about seven points apiece. Goalie Frederik Andersen has been rock-solid, sitting atop the playoff leaderboard with a 1.41 goals-against average while posting a sparkling .931 save percentage — tops among all netminders who have played more than four games.
In other hockey news today, Columbus’ Zach Werenski won his first Norris Trophy as the NHL’s top defenceman, while Colorado general manager Chris MacFarland left the Avs to become the president and GM of the Nashville Predators. Yesterday, two Vancouver teams made a move behind the bench as the Canucks named Manny Malhotra their new head coach and the PWHL’s Vancouver Goldeneyes parted with Brian Idalski after just one season.
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