Key Points
- Carolina beat Vegas 3-0 in Game 6 on June 14 to win the series 4-2.
- It is the franchise's first Stanley Cup since 2006, its second overall.
- Jordan Staal, 37, became the oldest Conn Smythe Trophy winner in NHL history.
- Rod Brind'Amour won as coach where he captained the 2006 title team.
The Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup on Sunday, shutting out the Vegas Golden Knights 3-0 in Game 6 at T-Mobile Arena to close out the Final 4-2. It is the second championship in franchise history and the first since 2006 — a 20-year wait that finally ended on the road, in the desert, against a Vegas team that had taken a 2-1 series lead a week earlier.
The clincher
Taylor Hall opened the scoring 3:47 into the first period, Jackson Blake doubled the lead in the second, and Nikolaj Ehlers buried an empty-netter to seal it. Goaltender Brandon Bussi stopped all 22 shots he faced for the shutout. Carolina finished the postseason 16-3, the fewest games any team has needed to win the Cup since 1988 — a run that started, fittingly, with the Game 4 win that evened this series at two before the Canes took the last three straight.
Staal makes history
Captain Jordan Staal took the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP after leading the team with six goals in the Final. At 37, Staal is the oldest Conn Smythe winner on record. He last won the Cup in 2009 with Pittsburgh, a 17-year wait between titles.
Brind'Amour closes the loop
Rod Brind'Amour wore the "C" when Carolina won its only previous Cup in 2006. Now the head coach, he becomes the seventh person in NHL history to win the Stanley Cup as both a player and a coach with the same franchise. "It was our time," Brind'Amour said. "We weren't going to be denied." He and Staal — who now wears the captaincy Brind'Amour once held — shared a long hug at center ice after the final horn.
The build
The win validates a front office that spent years being mocked for it. General manager Eric Tulsky, a former physical chemist who came up through the analytics side, built a roster around relentless forechecking and shot volume rather than star contracts — a model that produced a playoff appearance in every season since Brind'Amour took over in 2018 and, until Sunday, a reputation for falling short. The Hurricanes were the analytics darlings who couldn't finish. That argument is now closed.
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