The Stanley Cup Final Was a Celebration of Hockey's Glorious Weirdness
The Hurricanes were the logical champion. Everything else was a tribute to the beautiful messiness that makes hockey great.
As the Carolina Hurricanes were taking turns hoisting the Stanley Cup Sunday night — maybe my favorite annual tradition to watch in all of sports1 — I wrote that the victory was, at long last, a validation of the Canes’ long-term planning and analytical approach, implemented through what ESPN called the “jock-nerd alliance” of head coach Rod Brind’Amour and general manager Eric Tulsky. Carolina was the best team this season — their final Elo rating of 1611 ranks third-best among Cup winners since the ‘05 lockout, trailing only the 2022 Colorado Avalanche and 2008 Detroit Red Wings — and it made sense to see them prevail in the end.
Everything else around the Stanley Cup Final, however, was a celebration of hockey’s glorious weirdness.
Let’s start with the Vegas Golden Knights’ ongoing season arc. In addition to the team itself blowing a 2-1 lead in the series and missing a number of point-blank opportunities to make Game 6 interesting late, news came in the wake of the loss that coach John Tortorella would not be returning to the Knights’ bench next season. This marks just the eighth time since the playoffs expanded to 16 teams in 1980 that the coach of a Finals squad would not coach at least part of the following season for the same team:
But, of course, Torts was only in a position to lead Vegas in the first place because the Golden Knights made an absurdly late-season coaching change, as I wrote about here:
Vegas' Coaching Change Was Certainly Late — But Was It Also Too Little, or Just Right?
As I’ve written before, there are basically two kinds of NHL coaches: the currently-unemployed, and the soon-to-be unemployed.
At the time, replacing Bruce Cassidy with Tortorella on March 29 was the latest coaching change in a full, 82-game NHL season since at least the 2013-14 campaign. Ironically, the N.Y. Islanders actually surpassed that a week later when they fired Patrick Roy in favor of Pete DeBoer on April 5… but the Isles failed to make the playoffs — while the Knights obviously succeeded — so Torts’ hiring remains the latest recent coaching change for a playoff-bound team by a very wide margin:2
A win for Torts would have provided further validation to the very NBA-like idea that any coach can and should be fired at any moment, for any reason, if ownership gets panicked enough. But maybe what Vegas actually did following the loss — not giving Tortorella the chance to run it back, despite the Finals run and his seeming desire to keep coaching — was an even messier decision.
And while the winning team had no such coaching drama — Brind’Amour has been in place since 2018, making him the league’s third-longest-tenured bench boss — they certainly had their share of shakeups in another key position, between the pipes.
As I noted before the series, Carolina’s trip to the Finals was powered in large part by the play in net of veteran goalie Frederik Andersen, now in his fifth season with the Hurricanes. He’d been stellar in the playoffs to that point… but during the regular season beforehand, Andersen was one of the worst statistical netminders in hockey, and he ranked second in starts on his own team behind rookie Brandon Bussi — who, while not amazing in his own right (with a below-average .894 SV%), had been better all year.
But Brind’Amour handed the playoff keys to Andersen out of deference to experience, which looked genius when his goalie dominated Rounds 1-3 of the postseason. It looked less so when Andersen struggled out of the gates against Vegas, allowing 12 goals with an .815 SV% in the first 2⅔ games of the Finals. But then, with Andersen also showing signs of injury, Brind’Amour did his own version of Vegas’ late-season coaching swap: inserting Bussi back in for the third period of Game 3, which helped put Carolina in position to mount a record-breaking 4-goal comeback and force OT (even though they ended up losing).
From that point on, Bussi played like Andersen had in the lead-up to the Final, with a .947 SV% despite not having previously appeared all postseason long. It was just the 10th time in Stanley Cup Finals history that the winning team split series-wide goaltending minutes 60-40 or closer, and just the fourth time that split led to the playoff-long backup logging the most minutes during the Final itself.
It was partly indicative of the league’s current craze of goaltending tandems — which runs hand-in-hand with a quick trigger-finger to change things in net the moment they aren’t working — and partly indicative of just how much chaos and unpredictability even the “analytical” Hurricanes had to roll with to win their Cup.
Another major indicator: 37-year-old team captain Jordan Staal winning the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP. Staal became the oldest winner in history, and he did it almost completely on the strength of a five-game goal-scoring streak to begin the Final. Going into the series, he’d recorded just 2 goals and 5 points in 13 playoff games, which did not make him one of Carolina’s most valuable performers through the conference finals. And even after the series, he ended up with the sixth-fewest playoff Goals Above Replacement by a Conn Smythe recipient:
Then again, somebody had to win — and the usual narratives around hot goalies or big scorers didn’t really apply here.
In fact, this series was so messy that it really defied all broad storytelling tools.
Even what had started as arguably the most chaotic Final in Stanley Cup history eventually succumbed to the power of Carolina’s defense (and timely scoring) to suffocate the life out of Vegas’ chances. Going back to the win probability model we were playing with at mid-series, here is a goal-by-goal accounting of game-level odds for the entire series:
After the big swings — in both directions — of Games 1-3, Games 4-6 still had their share of big-time goals, but we can see that almost all of the movement happened with the Hurricanes favored to win the game (red shading). Their defense and possession-heavy playing style helped them regain control of the series and effectively smother the Golden Knights into submission.
In other words, the Hurricanes eventually made it make sense. But that wasn’t before no lead felt safe early in this series. Or before the Golden Knights nearly rode one of the latest coaching changes ever all the way to a championship (only to immediately move on from the coach who led them there). Or before the Hurricanes’ veteran playoff goalie lost his starting job mid-series, only for a rookie backup to play like a Conn Smythe candidate. Or before the actual Conn Smythe winner was a 37-year-old who turned a good-not-great postseason into immortality with one perfectly-timed scoring binge.
And after two straight years of the same Panthers-Oilers Final, maybe this was the messy finish we needed to remember how weird hockey can be, while still rewarding the team best equipped to withstand the weirdness.
I literally never miss it. I have seen the Cup be awarded and get paraded around every single year since the Devils won in 1995, when I was 9 years old.
Another bizarre irony is that Tortorella had just been on the receiving end of the latest pre-2026 change, when the Flyers pulled the plug on his confusing tenure there on March 27, 2025.
Final lines:
Andersen 15.2 IP, 0 ER, 11 K
Bussi 3.1 IP, 1 ER, 3 K
(rimshot)