LAS VEGAS – On October 1, Brandon Bussi was heading to Charlotte. The Florida Panthers had designated him for assignment, and the American Hockey League was where this story was supposed to end. Carolina’s coaches made a different call. They claimed him off waivers, gave him a locker room and told him to wait.
He waited 256 days. Then, on Sunday night at T-Mobile Arena, Bussi stopped all 22 shots he faced and the Carolina Hurricanes defeated the Vegas Golden Knights 3-0 in Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final to win the franchise’s second championship – and first in 20 years. The Cup was his to touch first.
“I’m feeling a little numb right now,” Bussi said on the ice as Canes fans who had made the cross-country trip flooded the lower bowl, red and black everywhere. “I’m sure I’m going to crash at some point, but I haven’t yet. I’m going to remember it obviously forever.”
Carolina’s championship did not arrive the way these things normally do. There was no Auston Matthews, no Nathan MacKinnon, no player so dominant that the narrative could collapse into a single name. What the Hurricanes built instead was something more stubborn and more instructive: a system so deeply embedded that it survived a 4-0 collapse in Game 3, a goaltender change mid-series, and a Vegas team that had been on the most improbable heater in recent playoff history. The Hurricanes finished 16-3 in the postseason – the fewest games required to win the Cup since the Edmonton Oilers went 16-2 in 1988.
Taylor Hall scored 3:47 into Game 6 to give Carolina the tone it needed. The goal came off a Jaccob Slavin stretch pass that found Hall alone behind the Vegas defense after Jackson Blake forced a Brett Howden turnover at the Carolina blue line. It was the kind of sequence the Hurricanes had been running all series – suffocating in their own zone and punishing teams in transition the moment the puck changed hands.
“You need to get that one,” Hall said afterward, the Stanley Cup somewhere behind him. “My career has taken a lot of different turns, but to end up here with this group of guys and to do this is amazing.”
Hall was himself a thrown-in. He arrived in Raleigh last summer as part of the three-way Mikko Rantanen deal, an afterthought on the transaction wire. He finished this run with 19 playoff points. That is the arithmetic of this Carolina team: players arrive undervalued, or arrive broken, and the organization makes them into something else.
Jordan Staal, 37, proved the rule most dramatically. He has not eclipsed 40 points in a regular season since 2017-18. In this Stanley Cup Final, he scored in each of the first five games – the first player in NHL history to accomplish that – and finished the series with six goals. The Conn Smythe Trophy, awarded to the playoff’s most valuable player, went to him Sunday night. He became the oldest recipient in the award’s history, at 37 years and 277 days.
“That’s a lot of years,” Staal said, standing at center ice with the trophy. “It’s amazing. This is something I’ve been going after ever since we got the first one. You want to win it again and again and again. The boys were grinding today, my goodness.”
His older brother Eric lifted this same Cup in this same franchise’s colors in 2006. Rod Brind’Amour captained that team. Sunday night, Brind’Amour became the first person to win the Stanley Cup as both a player and a coach for the Hurricanes. He has now been in the building – as player, assistant or head coach – for 102 of Carolina’s 104 all-time playoff victories.
“It was our time,” he said. “We weren’t going to be denied. This just didn’t happen this year. These guys have been doing this for eight years. It finally came through.”
The series nearly unraveled three games ago. Carolina trailed 4-0 heading into the third period of Game 3 and Brind’Amour pulled starter Frederik Andersen – a decision that, from the outside, looked like concession. It was not. Bussi entered, the Hurricanes went on a historic rally to force overtime, and though they lost, something had shifted. Bussi started Games 4, 5 and 6. Carolina won all three.
Andersen, who backstopped the team through three rounds before his Game 3 exit, was gracious about the role reversal. Bussi was more so. “I love him,” Bussi told reporters. “He’s the reason why we’re here. He’s a workhorse. I only got three-and-a-half games. He honestly deserves more of the credit.”
Vegas, to its credit, did not fold easily. The Golden Knights made their third Cup Final appearance as a franchise and had arrived here after sweeping Presidents’ Trophy winner Colorado in the Western Conference Final under first-year coach John Tortorella, who had replaced Bruce Cassidy with eight games left in the regular season. But in Game 6, the offense that scored 13 goals in the first three games simply disappeared. Vegas went 18 minutes and 37 seconds without a shot on goal spanning the second and third periods. Bussi faced 10 shots in the first period and nine in the second and third combined.
“This is tough to be on this side of it,” defenseman Brayden McNabb said in the handshake line. “These chances don’t come around very often. It stings.”
Nikolaj Ehlers added an empty-net goal to seal it. The final buzzer triggered a celebration that spilled from the ice into Raleigh’s streets, where tens of thousands of fans had gathered at watch parties across the city. Carolina’s path to this moment was eight years in the making under Brind’Amour, who came the closest in three consecutive conference final appearances before finally breaking through. A championship parade is scheduled for June 20 in downtown Raleigh.
What remains unanswered is whether Carolina can keep this group intact through a summer of free agency that will test the roster’s depth. Several key contributors are unsigned, and the economics of a championship roster rarely survive the offseason undisturbed. Brind’Amour has rebuilt this thing before. Whether he can do it a third time is the question that the celebration, for now, is allowed to ignore.
For Sunday night, the waiver-wire goaltender, the castoff former No. 1 pick, the 37-year-old center who hadn’t scored 40 points in eight years, and the coach who captained this franchise to its only other title – they were all that mattered. The Hurricanes are Stanley Cup champions. Twenty years is a long time. They made it look, in the end, almost inevitable.
