Carolina Hurricanes win first Stanley Cup since 2006
Published 8:43 am Monday, June 15, 2026
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 on Sunday at T-Mobile Arena. 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, his final day 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. After a five-game loss to the Florida Panthers in 2025, beaten by a team that Brind’Amour said “picked up (Carolina’s style) the last couple of years and made it that much better,” he held his thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart.
“So that’s what we’ve got to get.”
A year later, they’ve gotten those couple of inches. For Brind’Amour, it was never in doubt.
“It’s sticking with it,” Brind’Amour said after Sunday’s game. “We knew what we had here. I did, for sure, and the guys believed in it.”
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.
“So special. It’s so special,” Slavin said. “All these guys, I’ve been with for my whole career. I can’t be happier for them. It’s amazing to do it with people you love.
“We definitely had close calls, close calls, close calls, and now to finally get over that hump and be here and get the job done, it’s hard. It’s hard. But at the same time, it’s awesome.”
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, 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.
“That’s the game right there,” linemate Jackson Blake said. “It was 3-0 with an empty-netter, but if we don’t score that goal … that’s just what he does. That’s how he’s been all playoffs.”
The teammates Hall most frequently found over the course of the season, Stankoven and 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.
The goal was Blake’s seventh, fourth-most on Carolina behind Stankoven’s 11, and gave him 20 points — one ahead of Hall for the team lead. In each round, their line was a difference-maker.
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 sharpshooter Pavel Dorofeyev on a power play. In the third, with Vegas’ net empty, he robbed Tomas Hertl while sitting on his bottom.
The shutout was the ninth to clinch a Cup in the past 50 years and first since Andrei Vasilevskiy did it in 2021.
“Unbelievable,” Slavin said. “He played so good. We don’t win that game tonight without him.”
Blake, who scored the series-clinching goal in overtime against the Philadelphia Flyers in the second round, finished the postseason with multiple points in three consecutive series-clinching games. At 22, he’s the youngest player in NHL history to do so in a potential Cup-clinching game.
“(Hall) too, right? He’s still got a lot left in the tank,” Blake said. “But no, (Stankoven) was phenomenal. That last half of the (regular season) for him, no one was hotter in the whole world. He was hotter than anyone I’ve seen in my whole hockey career. The way he plays, and his effort and how much he cares for everyone, it’s amazing, and it’s so special. I hope we play together for the rest of our careers.”
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 the Hurricanes roll a third scoring line.
“I came here and wanted to be a part of the group,” Ehlers said, “and I feel as much a part of this group as I hoped. They welcomed me great from Day 1. I’m not the reason we won. This team is. We play for each other. To lose, what is it, three games in the whole playoffs is insane, but it shows what this team is made of.”
Ehlers’ line led the way for Carolina in the final, with Staal scoring six goals and seven points and winning the Conn Smythe as playoff MVP.
“A good time to get hot, eh? I mean, my goodness,” Staal said on the ice after the game. “I mean, I just wanted to win. I wanted to win so bad. That was it.”
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.
— Michael Russo contributed to this report.
