Carolina Hurricanes’ time has come: Why the 2023-24 season is ‘Stanley Cup or bust’
Barring some unforeseen future catastrophe, 2006 will always be the most important season in the history of the Carolina Hurricanes. Not because of how it ended, but because of the fog of uncertainty in which it began. How it ended changed all that, almost but not quite for forever.
As this next season begins, 18 years later, with the first practice of training camp on Thursday, only the fall of 2005 can compete in terms of the stakes. The future of the franchise is not at issue the way it was back then; to the contrary, it has never, ever been more assured than it is right now. But the Hurricanes will not have a better chance to win a second Stanley Cup in the immediate future. Their time has been coming for five years, and it is here, and it is now.
We’ve been talking for a couple years about their window to contend opening and closing, and the sash is hanging overhead now like a guillotine blade. With their core players in their primes and a pipeline of younger ones who continue to emerge, they’ll continue to be one of the NHL’s elite teams no matter what happens next summer, but these things ebb and flow, and there will be a natural regrouping after this season as contracts expire or are extended and the according adjustments are made to remain in cap compliance.
But by pushing off some of those decisions and potential departures — Brett Pesce, Brady Skjei, Teuvo Teravainen — and adding players on short-term contracts — Dmitri Orlov and the return of both of last season’s goalies — the Hurricanes have essentially propped this window, this very open window, open for another season.
They’re either the bookies’ first or second favorite to win the Cup. They’ve had all the postseason learning experiences they’re going to get. (Too many, you could argue.) There’s no interim position, no consolation prize. They enter this season with only one acceptable conclusion: That it ends with them raising the Stanley Cup.
Watching the Vegas Golden Knights make quick work of the Florida Panthers in the Stanley Cup finals only underlined what a missed opportunity last season was, even without Max Pacioretty and Andrei Svechnikov. This confluence of circumstances and perhaps destiny has never happened before in the entire history of the Hurricanes, and it might never happen again, although certainly that possibility exists. There’s no room to fail.
Meanwhile, off the ice, the franchise has never had more momentum. Finally, for the first time in 25 years here, the team, arena authority, city, county and N.C. State are all aligned on the future of PNC Arena and the land around it. The long-term lease extension that goes with that assures the team will be here through 2044 and most likely far beyond. The cloud of uncertainty that has hung over NHL hockey in Raleigh to varying degrees has dissipated entirely.
Which is also why this season can’t quite top 2006 when it comes to the stakes. Coming out of a lockout that wiped out an entire NHL season, the Hurricanes’ status in the Triangle was so tenuous the team’s marketing slogan coming out of the stoppage was “Here to play, here to stay,” which sounds absolutely ludicrous now but assuredly made sense at the time.
The Hurricanes had squandered all the momentum of the playoff run in 2002 by finishing dead effing last in the league a year later, firing Paul Maurice in the process. But Peter Laviolette and Jim Rutherford masterfully anticipated the post-lockout style of play that made the NHL’s Dead Puck Era extinct and the rest is history.
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What’s less remembered is that the Hurricanes desperately needed to attain some kind of relevance that season, and while it didn’t necessarily need a Stanley Cup to do it, that stabilized the franchise for another decade, until Peter Karmanos ran out of money and the Hurricanes withered into irrelevance under the “leadership” of the later-exposed-as-vile Bill Peters and Ron Francis, who didn’t make a significant player-for-player trade in his entire tenure.
Since Tom Dundon bought the Hurricanes and quickly dispatched both Peters and Francis, it’s been a steady upward ascent, culminating in two straight gut-wrenching, avoidable playoff losses to demonstrably inferior opponents.
Now, the Hurricanes have thrown all their chips onto the table. They’ve gone all-in on this season. For the first time in their entire existence, this is a fact: Nothing but a championship will suffice.
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This story was originally published September 20, 2023 at 12:54 PM with the headline "Carolina Hurricanes’ time has come: Why the 2023-24 season is ‘Stanley Cup or bust’."
