I am going to put Carolina’s Game 1 performance in the Eastern Conference Final on the back burner for now.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I am going to put Carolina’s Game 1 performance in the Eastern Conference Final on the back burner…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":660476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-660475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}