LAS VEGAS — The hardest decision Rod Brind’Amour has faced all postseason will not be resolved until Monday afternoon. Whether Frederik Andersen or Brandon Bussi starts Tuesday’s Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Final against the Vegas Golden Knights is a question the Carolina Hurricanes coach declined to answer on Sunday, saying only that he would wait until after practice to settle the lineup.
What happened in the third period of Saturday’s 5-4 double-overtime loss may have made that question impossible to dodge. Bussi, 27, had not played a single minute in the playoffs before Brind’Amour sent him out to start the third period with his team trailing 4-0. What followed was the kind of performance that rewrites a series: 18 saves, including a penalty shot stop on Mitch Marner at 4:04 of the third, before a fluky Shea Theodore winner off the end boards ended it in the second overtime. The Hurricanes had scored four goals in the third — three of them in 39 seconds, a Stanley Cup Final record — and nearly stole a game they had no business being in.
That near-miracle now sits at the center of everything. Carolina trails 2-1 in the best-of-7 series. A loss Tuesday and the Hurricanes face a 3-1 deficit heading home for Game 5, a hole from which no team in NHL history has recovered in more than a handful of occasions. Brind’Amour, typically direct, gave nothing away Sunday morning.
“I don’t anticipate any changes,” the coach said, before walking it back entirely when pressed. “We’ll make all the decisions after we practice tomorrow, see how he’s feeling. I haven’t made any decisions on the lineup, so I can’t tell you.”
The numbers on Andersen in the series are hard to ignore. A 4.44 goals-against average and an .815 save percentage across three games against the Golden Knights stands in stark contrast to the 12-1 record, 1.41 GAA, .931 save percentage and three shutouts he put together in the first three rounds. Vegas has found angles into the Hurricanes’ defensive structure that Raleigh’s opponents in the earlier rounds could not, and the 36-year-old Dane has not been able to paper over those mistakes the way he did against Florida, Boston and Montreal.
“Obviously, don’t want to give up some of the chances we’ve given up,” Brind’Amour said. “But overall, I thought he’s been fine. You’ve got to ask him to make the saves that he’s got to make, and I think he’s done that. A couple of bounces, they are what they are, so he’s been solid for us. ‘Bus’ came in and was solid for us, so that’s got to continue.”
Bussi’s story is a particular kind of hockey improbability. Claimed off waivers from the Florida Panthers in October, he had not appeared in an NHL game before this season. He won 31 regular-season games. He spent the entire postseason watching Andersen, one of the steadiest playoff goalies in the sport over the last decade, from the bench. Then, in the building where the Golden Knights won their first Stanley Cup three years ago, he stepped in front of 18,233 fans who had been anticipating a coronation, and stood on his head.
The penalty shot stop was the moment that crystallized it. Marner, who had scored three goals in 6:10 of the second period — the fastest hat trick in Stanley Cup Final history — came in alone. Bussi read the backhand and turned it away clean. The crowd went quiet. The Hurricanes scored 2:59 later. What had looked like a burial became a resurrection, and Bussi was the reason it was possible at all.
“He was incredible,” Jordan Martinook said. “But we know we’ve had two good guys all year, so we have a ton of faith in ‘Buss,’ and he played well when he got in there.”
The argument for returning to Andersen is not without logic. He went 13-1 overall in the playoffs, a record that speaks for itself. He has been in this situation before. He knows how to handle the weight of a Cup Final. Bussi, for all his composure on Saturday, has exactly one playoff appearance to his name, and the Golden Knights have a full day of film to study. What worked once, the argument goes, may not work again.
But that argument runs into the second period of Game 3, where Vegas outscored Carolina 4-0 and Andersen allowed four goals on 14 shots. It runs into the broader pattern: the Golden Knights have outscored the Hurricanes 7-1 in the second period across the entire series. Marner has three goals and an assist in middle frames alone. These are not random bounces. They reflect something structural about how Vegas is attacking Carolina’s defensive setup, something that has not been solved in three games under the same goaltender.
Brind’Amour acknowledged the pattern without fully accepting the diagnosis. He pointed to Marner getting behind his defensemen repeatedly as the central problem — “that’s kind of been a common theme there,” the coach said — and framed it as something the team, not just the goaltender, needs to fix. Marner was slashed on a short-handed breakaway by Sebastian Aho in the third period. He hit the post moments before his second goal. The Hurricanes gave Marner the ice he needed, and neither Andersen nor Bussi can solve that.
“We have to know when he’s on the ice,” Brind’Amour said, “because that’s kind of how he loves to play. If we can eliminate some of those, I call them freebies, where you’ve got to go with him, take that out of there, that’ll definitely help.”
There is one other variable in Brind’Amour’s Tuesday lineup. Fourth-line forward William Carrier left Saturday’s game in the first period with an apparent upper-body injury, played a handful of shifts in the second, then did not return. Brind’Amour said Sunday he was “hopeful” Carrier would be available but had not yet spoken with head athletic trainer Doug Bennett to confirm. If Carrier cannot go, the choices to replace him are telling in their own way: Jesperi Kotkaniemi, who has not played a minute in the postseason, or Nicolas Deslauriers, a 35-year-old enforcer who has appeared in exactly one playoff game this spring. Neither would meaningfully change the fourth-line calculus.
Carolina’s belief, Brind’Amour kept insisting, remains intact. They were “one shot away” in both games they lost. They set three records in the third period on Saturday. They have the personnel and the system to win this series. But the Hurricanes have also not led in a single period of the Stanley Cup Final. Their season now rests on a decision that will be made somewhere between a practice rink and a whiteboard sometime Monday afternoon — and on whether Brind’Amour’s faith in what he knows outweighs the case for what he just watched.
Game 4 is Tuesday at T-Mobile Arena (8 p.m. ET, ABC). Carolina, as NHL.com’s Tom Gulitti reported, will name its starter after Monday’s practice. What Brind’Amour decides will say something about what he actually believes went wrong — and what he thinks can be fixed in time.
The Eastern Herald’s coverage of Game 3’s records and chaos and Theodore’s improbable double-overtime winner frames how the series arrived at this inflection point.
