Burnside: An Overview As The Carolina Hurricanes Enter The 2022-23 Season

RALEIGH, N.C. - In the fall of 2018, with a whopper storm somehow fittingly flooding streets and taking down trees and power lines throughout the Raleigh area, Rod Brind'Amour gave his first address to the Carolina Hurricanes as the team's head coach.
He forgot a line that he'd practiced on his wife, but it was a rare misstep for the rookie head coach. And it certainly didn't matter to the group of players who seemed to soak up every word delivered by the longtime NHL player, captain of the Carolina Stanley Cup-winning team in 2006 and two-time Frank J. Selke Trophy winner.

On that morning Brind'Amour promised that the team was going to stop taking the springs off and he spoke of creating a culture and style of play that would clearly define this team. He wanted to separate from its own past and from the other teams they were competing with in the NHL.
In so many ways, on so many levels, what Brind'Amour has done in his first four seasons as an NHL coach has met all of those goals and more.
The Hurricanes made the playoffs in 2019, ending a decade of playoff futility. They were also en route to their first conference final appearance since 2009, promptly knocking off the defending Stanley Cup champion Washington Capitals in an engrossing seven-game series.
Every year since the Hurricanes have made the playoffs, and they've accomplished something that has never happened since the team's arrival in North Carolina in 1997 - they've won at least one round in each of those seasons (we're including a play-in round win over the New York Rangers in 2020).
The expectations internally and externally have never been as high for this team at any point in its existence heading into a 25th anniversary season. And so as Brind'Amour stepped to the front of the room to address the team and its staff at the outset of this 2022-23 training camp, one wondered if the message would be different for the start of year five.
Would Brind'Amour take a different tack after his team dropped an emotional seven-game, second-round series to the New York Rangers to end their 2022 playoff dreams?
Not exactly. Actually, not at all.
"I used to always say, 'I've got to change it,'" Brind'Amour said in an interview shortly after his brief address to his team. "How do I change it? But then I thought, 'that's the wrong message.' The message, we know what it is, I've got to keep pounding it."
And so instead of 'back to the drawing board' after two straight years of falling in the second round to quality opponents, it's stay the course.
"The message has to stay the same. We preach a lot about pounding the rock. You've got to keep doing it and eventually it's going to break the way you want it," Brind'Amour said. "It's kind of easy in a sense that it's gotten easier because I know the message like the back of my hand. I believe in the message even more now than I ever did because now I know it works."
This, like the last few off-seasons under GM Don Waddell and since Brind'Amour took over in the summer of 2018, has been a busy one. And that busyness continues to illustrate just how things have changed around Raleigh and how dramatically the team's profile among the pantheon of NHL teams has been elevated.
Most NHL observers we talked to believe the Hurricanes are a virtual lock for a fifth straight playoff berth. In fact many believe the Hurricanes should be in line for a second straight Metropolitan Division title (they won the Central Division in the pandemic-altered 2020-21 season) and are a legitimate Stanley Cup contender, especially with the additions of veteran talents Brent Burns, Paul Stastny and Max Pacioretty - although Pacioretty's pre-training camp Achilles tendon injury that will keep him out of the lineup until February was a setback.
Throw in the team's first outdoor game set for Carter-Finley Stadium across the parking lot from PNC Arena on Feb. 18 and you have a season that is chock-a-block full of anticipation and expectation.
The Burns acquisition is especially instructive on a number of levels.
Waddell traded restricted free agent Tony DeAngelo to Philadelphia at the draft and he knew the chances of re-signing unrestricted free agents Nino Niederreiter and Vincent Trocheck were slim. He also knew the prices in free agency can often throw a team's salary cap situation out of whack.
So he began exploring old-fashioned hockey trades, including a chat with new San Jose GM Mike Grier about the availability of Burns - who has recorded more points as a defenseman since 2013-14 than any other NHL defender. Burns had a three-team trade list and Carolina wasn't on that list. Waddell told Grier that before they continued discussions they needed to find out if Carolina was on Burns' radar.
"He called me back like within 10 minutes and said 100 percent he'll come to you guys," Waddell said.
Pacioretty had a partial no-trade clause which included Carolina as a possible destination, paving the way for his addition for future considerations from Vegas.
And late in the off-season veteran forward Paul Stastny eschewed more money elsewhere to join the Hurricanes on a one-year deal.
"If you go back, I can't say we were ever a destination place. But now even leading up to free agency we were getting a lot of calls from a lot of people expressing an interest in coming here," Waddell said. "That wasn't me having to sell anything on our team."
"The Burns thing, it's always good to hear that especially when a player is so limited to where he wants to be traded to. I think it takes time to change it but I think we're in a good spot now," the GM added.
It's not just one thing, of course, that creates this dynamic, the making of a team into a destination market. And as history has shown in other cities, it may not last forever. But the growth of the game in the marketplace, a new practice facility, an owner that spends to the cap every year, a roster of emerging young talent, and one of the game's finest coaches have redefined what it means to be a Carolina Hurricane.
"When a team is pretty close and can really feel that they have a chance, that's a special thing too," Burns said. "It's exciting. It makes it a lot easier to work for it."

And so the narratives in Raleigh vis a vis this club are different yet again on the eve of the 2022-23 season from a year ago - just as the expectations and the challenges moving forward are different.
The Hurricanes are among that group of elite teams that has yet to solve the ultimate Stanley Cup puzzle, but believe the answers are at hand.
And so the mindset must be one of patience and focus.
You can't win a playoff series in October.
You can't exorcise the taste of last spring's second-round loss to the New York Rangers, a series in which the Hurricanes led 2-0, in October.
So while there may be an inherent sense of impatience at having to wait until the playoffs for 'what really matters,' that cannot be the mindset in the locker room. Instead, there must be an embracing of the journey that begins at PNC Arena on Oct. 12 against Columbus. That also means processing the disappointment and the lessons learned from last spring's loss to the Rangers.
"It hurt. It hurt pretty long," Sebastian Aho said during a training camp chat. "It still kind of does, but at this time we're already so excited about this coming season and you realize that there's a good team here. We have another chance to do something special with this team."
Aho is part of a talented young core that will be looking to elevate their game even further in the coming weeks and months. That elevation isn't just in terms of statistical performance, but in rising to the occasion in critical moments.
"I sure do remember what happened and obviously the end of the season that hurt so bad, so I kind of use that as a motivation," Aho said. "It was pretty easy to get up and go to work in the morning because you don't want to feel like that ever again. And so hopefully it turns out in the end to be a good thing, but it definitely hurt."
"We know what our goal is, but it kind of feels like a little bit weird to talk about because it's so far away," Aho added. "We'll take care of today, then hopefully that gets us a little bit better every day and gives us a chance in eight months."

Jordan Staal remembers the days in Raleigh when training camp meant looking around and wondering how the team was going to scrabble and claw their way to enough points to stay in the playoff hunt. And he remembers how at the end of too many seasons the reality was it couldn't be done.
Now, in the final year of his current deal, Staal is a cornerstone of what has been built and what is continuing to be built with this franchise.
"It's been really rewarding for me," Staal said as he prepares for his 11th season in Canes colors.
"There were a lot of years where it was just tough times. To be a part of it turning around and really just see it with my own eyes, and know with the young guys how they slowly took over this team. They really pushed it to another level and it's just fun to be a part of and play alongside these guys," Staal said after a recent practice.
"Obviously to be part of what Roddy's trying to preach here, I try to push that and see how much we can get out of every single person in this room. That's the culture that Roddy created and I'm happy to be part of and try and help out with," he added.
Staal's voice will be critical to keeping perspective and not looking too far ahead in these early stages of this current season.
"You have to take those steps, you have to build a team, you have to build trust, you have to build belief in our game and what we do and that starts from now," said Staal, who has seen that process first hand with a trip to the 2008 Stanley Cup final and then a Stanley Cup win in 2009 with Pittsburgh.
"That's kind of the best part of playing the game. It's getting obviously to the final, but really it's about the ride, how you do it, who you do it with and I mean that's what I love about it," Staal said.
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