I am going to put Carolina’s Game 1 performance in the Eastern Conference Final on the back burner for now.
It happened. It was bad. It continued Carolina’s struggles in this round. But after winning eight straight games to open the playoffs, and with a 12-day layoff between games, there had to be at least some expectation for a letdown at some point. It happened.
But Carolina is still very much in the series and still has a great chance to break through to the Stanley Cup Final. If it does, Tulsky deserves a ton of credit for that, given the moves he has made over the past year-and-a-half.
The Mikko Rantanen situation looked bad from an optics perspective, but getting Taylor Hall, Logan Stankoven, and eventually K’Andre Miller out of that, plus an additional first-round pick that can be further used as trade bait, was a huge, massive win. Hall, Stankoven, and Miller have all played pivotal roles in Carolina’s early playoff dominance.
Tulsky and the Hurricanes have also locked in significant parts of their young core to long-term, team-friendly contracts that will continue to give them long-term flexibility to keep adding to their roster. A lot of that flexibility was put into place in the offseason when they signed Nikolaj Ehlers in unrestricted free agency, giving the team another much-needed impact forward.
It is a fantastically deep, talented roster that has almost no real weaknesses. Tulsky and his management team deserve a ton of credit for that.