For a team that was known for playing yesterday's hockey for a decade and being punished regularly for it, the Carolina Hurricanes played a lot like a historically elite team. You just didn't get to see a lot of it because they played so few games, which is proof if proof were needed that the historically elite thing was very real.
The Canes won their first Stanley Cup in two decades with a clinical and almost bloodless 3-0 beatdown of the thoroughly gassed Vegas Golden Knights, and in many ways it was their most dominant performance of them all. All, of course, being 19 games, the fewest number of games needed by a champion since the 1988 Edmonton Gretzkys. After four bizarre games to start the series, Carolina controlled the Knights in Game 5 and utterly smothered and shrink-wrapped them Sunday night, nursing an early lead and sealing off Vegas's attempted zone entries so well that Vegas went 18 and a half minutes without a single shot on goal. It was in many ways the perfect example of the tight-checking style head coach Rod Brind'Amour had designed and relied upon when he took the job eight years ago, the style that became the main weapon used by his critics when their abbreviated playoff runs were cited. Going 1-12 in Conference Finals games had become his biography.
This game, though, served as repudiation of all those critics and their quibbles, and for a myriad of reasons. It was the zenith (so far) of rookie goalie Brandon Bussi's very brief career; having entered Game 3 when starter Frederik Andersen hurt his knee (a fact concealed until the end of the series), he became the stalwart in net the Canes had been looking for, even though Andersen had bene perfectly competent against low-watt opponents Ottawa, Philadelphia, and Montreal. It was the culmination of Jordan Staal's career, as he became the first player in league history to win two Cups 17 years apart and the oldest player to win the Conn Smythe Trophy—three games after it had been all but ceded to Vegas' Mitch Marner. It was a hat tip to the five players who had come to Raleigh with Brind'Amour and remained (Staal, Jaccob Slavin, Sebastian Aho, Jordan Martinook and Andrei Svechnikov). It was a nod to age and experience in general; the Canes' average age for their top 20 players is 29, and Staal, who received the Cup from NHL bric-a-brac salesman Gary Bettman, saw to it that the first person he handed the Cup to was Andersen, who, while nowhere near a Canes lifer, is 36.
Unlike the New York Knicks, who also played only 19 postseason games and were being declared the greatest team in New York history by overenthusiasts who didn't have the time to declare Jalen Brunson the greatest Knick of all time, the Canes were clinical in victory. They had their odd moments of comeback frenzy, especially in the Final, but mostly they were steely-eyed in crushing the field, and Game 6 was their most dominant of all.
Comparisons between the two champions reasonably stop at the swiftness of the completed task. New York considers itself the definitive one-off town, that by existing allows all the others to exist in their aura, while Carolina used to be the Hartford Whalers and whose claim to historical hegemony ends the moment Duke or UNC are allowed in the picture. In the end, the real brass-tacks moment is in how much champagne your trophy can hold. Once again, the Canes win going away.
