What they still need
The Hurricanes have had a quiet offseason so far, but they didn’t need much after winning the Stanley Cup. Although they lost Andersen as an unrestricted free agent, they still have Brandon Bussi, who started and won the last three games of the Stanley Cup Final, and Pyotr Kochetkov in net. Carolina needs to re-sign restricted free agent defenseman Alexander Nikishin, who has been mentioned in trade rumors.
They said it
“There’s still a lot of room to improve. I think the team when it was playing its best was incredibly hard to beat and down the stretch and into the playoffs they were playing very, very well, but there’s always room to improve. There’s always spots we can get better. Our goal is to build a team that is good enough that even when we’re not playing our best, even when we have some injuries, we still can win the Cup.” — Hurricanes general manager Eric Tulsky
EDGE stat to watch
For a fifth straight regular season (since start of puck and player tracking era in 2021-22), Carolina led the League in offensive zone time percentage (45.5). Defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere (49.6; first) and forwards Andrei Svechnikov (49.3; second), Seth Jarvis (48.2; sixth), Sebastian Aho (48.2; seventh) and Taylor Hall (47.7; 10th) gave the Hurricanes five of the top 10 skaters in that category. The Hurricanes were also tied for the NHL lead in midrange goals (104) and ranked second in all three major shots on goal location categories: high-danger SOG (723), midrange SOG (769) and long-range SOG (627). — Troy Perlowitz