LAS VEGAS — When Carolina Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour lifted the Stanley Cup on Sunday night, he said hello to an old friend.
It had been 20 years since Brind’Amour became the first Hurricanes player to ever touch the Stanley Cup, having captained Carolina to the 2006 championship as a 34-year-old in his 17th NHL season.
He waited 15 seasons to win it while wearing a suit behind their bench: Brind’Amour is just the seventh person in NHL history to lift the Stanley Cup as a player and a head coach for the same team, and the first since 1956. He’s just the 14th person to win the Cup as a player and a coach for any team.
Across the ice in Las Vegas, amid the hugs and tears from players and their families, general manager Eric Tulsky was a Stanley Cup champion for the first time, an unfathomable scenario for him 20 years ago.
When Brind’Amour lifted the Cup in 2006, Tulsky was analyzing the synthesis of cadmium-free nanocrystals for clinical applications as a scientist for a nanotech company in Washington state. He never conceived of a career in the NHL, what with all those cadmium-free nanocrystals to analyze.
“It is still wild to me that I ended up here. I don’t know how that happened,” Tulsky said. “Never thought I’d have this opportunity. But the coach and the players have brought us here.”
Brind’Amour and Tulsky are truly the NHL’s odd couple. A hockey lifer in his 35th season as a player and coach, and someone whose journey to the league started in the comments section of a hockey blog. A legendary fitness freak nicknamed “Rod the Bod,” who can still outlift his players, and an advanced analytics wizard who doesn’t return a search result in the internet hockey database.
Rousing locker room speeches and unemotional analysis of players. The Selke Trophy winner and the nanotech scientist.
In the crassest terms: The jock and the nerd.
“It feels like they’re yin and yang, right?” forward Jordan Martinook said with a laugh. “But when people get married, what do they usually say? Opposites attract. Maybe that’s what we needed. The opposite guys. And then they create magic.”
One doesn’t lift the Cup without the other this season. It took Brind’Amour’s motivation, attention to detail and heart-to-heart relationship with his players. It took Tulsky’s brilliant asset management, audacious acquisitions and the humility to pivot from a rare failure. It took them both listening to and trusting the other, despite their disparate backgrounds.
It took all of that for the Hurricanes to win the Stanley Cup.
“I do think they balance each other out quite well, and that’s the best part about it. Tulsky is great with numbers. Roddy’s been here coaching, and had been here playing,” Hurricanes forward Seth Jarvis said.
“Now, no disrespect to Eric, but I do think Roddy could snap him in half if he wanted to. I’m not saying he would. But he could.”
TULSKY AND BRIND’AMOUR don’t agree on everything, but there’s a collaborative spirit and mutual respect that’s inherent to their relationship. They’re aligned on what kinds of players they want to play a system that produces all the play-driving analytics Tulsky seeks and all the old-school blunt-force hockey that Brind’Amour wants to see.
In the end, the guy making the trades and the guy designing the plays share one important philosophy that has driven Carolina to their first championship in 20 years.
“Rod has the team playing very aggressive on the ice. We want to be aggressive off the ice, too,” the general manager said.
Tulsky grew up a sports fan in Philadelphia. He’d watch Mike Schmidt and the Phillies at The Vet and still lets an occasional “Go Birds!” slip out during NFL season. His Flyers fandom is dormant, which is a necessity when working for another NHL team — one that, incidentally, swept Philadelphia out of the playoffs this season.
But the Flyers are an essential part of Tulsky’s extremely unusual origin story.
Those around the Hurricanes use the word “genius” to describe him, without irony. He holds a B.A. in chemistry and physics from Harvard, as well as a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkely. He conducted a two-year, post-doctoral study at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., where he worked on the synthesis of novel colloidal nanoparticles.
Tulsky spent about a dozen years in the tech industry. He was a scientist at a biotech firm called Life Technologies in the Pacific Northwest, and later moved to the Bay Area to apply nanoscience to solar cells. His favorite bit of nanotechnical research involved making rocks small enough where they begin to emit light. You might know them better as the quantum dots in your QLED TVs.
At last count, Tulsky holds 27 U.S. patents, some that have been applied to items that are “on or are going to market soon,” he said in 2024.
It was during Tulsky’s time in the Bay Area, around 2010, when he discovered Broad Street Hockey, a blog covering the Flyers. Like many blogs at the time, it sought to counterbalance mainstream coverage with data-driven analysis. This was the entry point into hockey that Tulsky didn’t even know existed.
He began commenting on blog posts as “Eric T,” whose takes were smarter than your average troll. Tulsky had developed a program that would scrape shots on goal data from NHL game reports and began using that analysis online.
“These were the early days in the field, when there was a lot that still needed to be fleshed out,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer in May. “Pretty quickly, I found myself starting to want to answer some of those questions.”
Also pretty quickly, “Eric T.” moved from the comments section to staff blogger for Broad Street Hockey, quickly earning a reputation in that community as a visionary analyst. Yahoo Sports called him “hockey stat nerd elite.” Eventually, he’d create a general hockey site called NHL Numbers, and would present at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in 2013 on “Using Zone Entry Data to Separate Offensive, Neutral, and Defensive Zone Performance.”
From Tulsky’s presentation: “The team’s shot differential — which has been shown to be a strong predictor of wins — is determined almost entirely in the much less-heralded neutral zone. Neutral zone success involves more than getting extra zone entries; since carrying the puck across the blue line generates more than twice as many shots, scoring chances, and goals as dumping the puck in, gaining the zone with possession is a major driver of success.”
Sound a bit like the philosophy of a certain newly crowned Stanley Cup champion?
Tulsky was hired by the Hurricanes as a long-distance consultant in 2014, while he was still living in the Bay Area. Three years later, he was manager of hockey analytics. One year after that, he was VP of hockey management and strategy. Two years after that, in 2020, he was promoted to assistant general manager under Don Waddell.
It wasn’t a path that the nanotech scientist was intending for his life to take. But suddenly, Tulsky was part of a wave of hockey numbers guys who were getting hired by NHL teams.
John Chayka became the NHL’s youngest general manager at 26 in 2016, when the Arizona Coyotes hired him as GM. The Toronto Maple Leafs made 32-year-old Kyle Dubas their GM in 2018, after he built out an impressive analytics department. (The Leafs, incidentally, just hired Chayka as their GM last month.) Tyler Dellow, now the assistant GM under Tulsky in Carolina, was an analytics consultant with Edmonton before being hired as the senior VP of hockey strategy and analytics for the New Jersey Devils in 2019.
(Tulsky and Dellow share an origin story: Before his NHL career, Dellow was a lawyer better known online as “Mudcrutch,” running a combative hockey blog called mc79hockey. You might remember him as the guy who deciphered redacted information in emails sent by NHL VP of hockey operations Colin Campbell during a 2010 scandal.)
It seemed like it was only a matter of where and when Tulsky would get his chance to be an NHL general manager. He interviewed with the Chicago Blackhawks and the Pittsburgh Penguins. But in 2024, an unexpected opportunity popped up: Waddell resigned in Carolina, leaving before the last year of his contract to take over hockey operations for the Columbus Blue Jackets.
Many were surprised that Tulsky wasn’t immediately elevated to succeed Waddell, but owner Tom Dundon wanted more time to evaluate his options. Less than a month later, the obvious thing became obvious: Eric Tulsky — Ph.D. in chemistry, nanotechnology expert, former hockey blogger — was named the GM of the Carolina Hurricanes.
“When Don left, we weren’t really sure which way they were going to go. Were they going to go in-house?” Martinook recalled. “When Don was here, we didn’t really see Eric all that much. Obviously, we heard about him — and there were other teams asking about him. But I think he’s done an incredible job setting up our team for success.”
Jarvis couldn’t recall his immediate reaction when Tulsky was formally hired, but he did know something about him.
“I knew he was extremely smart,” he said. “And that’s hard to find in hockey sometimes.”
Especially when it comes to being smart enough to pivot from managerial mistakes. Tulsky made a significant one in 2025. How he recovered from it helped turn the Hurricanes into Stanley Cup champions.
IN HIS FIRST summer as GM, Tulsky talked to all 31 of his counterparts about trade possibilities. His conversation with the Colorado Avalanche produced a fascinating name: star winger Mikko Rantanen, the sixth-leading scorer in the NHL over the previous three seasons, who would be an unrestricted free agent at the end of the 2024-25 season.
One of the reasons the Hurricanes had been unable to break through to play for the Stanley Cup was simply not getting a critical goal at a critical time in the postseason. Entering this postseason, the Hurricanes ranked eighth in playoff scoring (minimum 50 games) since Brind’Amour took over in 2018-19 with 2.89 goals per game — much lower than their average in the regular season (3.22) during that span.
Their goal-scoring didn’t show up in later rounds. In 13 previous games in the conference finals, the Hurricanes averaged 1.61 goals in series losses to the Boston Bruins (2019) and Florida Panthers (2023, 2025).
Tulsky and Waddell sought to remedy that with a blockbuster trade at the 2024 deadline, acquiring Stanley Cup champion Jake Guentzel from the Pittsburgh Penguins, a player with 34 goals in 58 playoff games. He scored four goals in 11 playoff games for Carolina before they bowed out to the New York Rangers in the second round. Tulsky and Dundon tried to bring Guentzel back after the season, but the unrestricted free agent signed with the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Had Guentzel stayed, perhaps Tulsky never would have traded for Rantanen. But he didn’t sign, so Carolina still had the need for an impact playoff scorer and skilled offensive star again last season. They were in talks with the Vancouver Canucks, reportedly seeking to acquire center J.T. Miller. But on Jan. 24, 2025, the Hurricanes and Avalanche made the Mikko Rantanen trade.
One of Tulsky’s mantras is “we’re not afraid of risks,” and the Rantanen trade was a major one, as Rantanen was eligible to become a free agent that summer. “Carolina will look stupid if they lose in the first round and he walks away to another team,” an agent told ESPN at the time.
But Rantanen wouldn’t appear in a playoff game for the Hurricanes. He would play only 13 regular-season games, amassing six points. Tulsky and Dundon felt they could convince Rantanen to sign an extension after he joined their team, with a huge contract offer and some Finnish countrymen on the roster, such as Sebastian Aho. They were stunned when Rantanen said he didn’t want to play in Raleigh after so many of their players had committed long-term there, from Jarvis to star defenseman Jaccob Slavin.
A less-confident front office might have doubled down on Rantanen, retaining him for a run at the Cup despite knowing that he’d leave after the season. But Tulsky trusted that if the team ran through all the possibilities, their methodology would produce a viable solution.
So they went into the lab and cooked up a second Rantanen trade, sending him to the Dallas Stars, with whom he signed an eight-year contract.
“There’s lots of opportunities to make the team better. The deadline is one that people focus on because it’s the middle of the season and it’s the one closest to the playoffs. But we did a lot of work in the offseason to make the team better,” Tulsky said during the Stanley Cup Final. “I feel like we’ve taken some real steps this year as a result.”
Consider everything that resulted from those two trades for Carolina:
- Winger Taylor Hall, who was second on the team in playoff points (19). He was acquired from Chicago as the Blackhawks ate part of Rantanen’s salary during the initial trade. His physicality, offense and antagonism have been essential parts of this Cup run.
- Center Logan Stankoven, the centerpiece of their trade with Dallas, was their leading goal scorer in the playoffs (11). The 23-year-old center combined with Hall and winger Jackson Blake to form perhaps the 2026 playoffs’ best line combination.
- Defenseman K’Andre Miller was acquired in July 2025 from the Rangers for top defensive prospect Scott Morrow and the 2026 first-round pick acquired from Dallas for Rantanen. His transformation on the Carolina blue line has been revelatory.
- Finally, by not signing Guentzel or Rantanen or winger Martin Necas — who was shipped to Colorado and inked an eight-year contract with a $11.5 million annual cap hit with the Avalanche — the Hurricanes had the financial flexibility to win the hand of former Winnipeg Jets winger Nikolaj Ehlers as a free agent last summer (six years, $51 million), despite a heavy courtship from the Washington Capitals. That gave the Canes that skilled offensive difference maker in the playoffs they desired. He had eight goals and 10 assists in 18 games, including nine points in the six games of the Stanley Cup Final — and the Cup-clinching empty-net goal in Game 6.
It was quite a first season at the helm for Tulsky.
Before this season, he sat down with a local television reporter who asked him whether there was “a confidence” that comes with one completed season as a GM.
Tulsky chuckled. “I mean, honestly, I don’t think I lack for confidence in anything I do,” he replied.
That includes being one of the faces of the franchise this season, from on-camera interviews to a pre-playoff home game ritual in which Tulsky — in a suit and tie — visits the tailgating fans in the Lenovo Center parking lot for conversations and photo opportunities.
“The perception that I am somebody who knows how to use a spreadsheet and doesn’t know how to talk to people, I think that is probably not what you come away thinking when you get to know me,” he told The Athletic last year.
Brind’Amour has gotten to know Tulsky more over the past two years. Before the Hurricanes’ conference finals series against Montreal, I asked the coach what he appreciated most about Tulsky … and he immediately thanked me for the question.
“You haven’t heard my answer yet,” Brind’Amour deadpanned, to laughter.
The coach then acknowledged they come from very different worlds.
“I think what impresses me the most is his willingness to understand the world that I’m in. The world that we eat, breathe during our whole life and to try to really grasp that,” the coach said. “I think that’s been the biggest thing for me. He’s always asking questions to get a true understanding of why we think this way.”
BRIND’AMOUR WAS RAISED in Campbell River, British Columbia. The legend of “Rod The Bod” was born in his basement.
His dad was a pipefitter, getting up at 5:45 a.m. every day to “do a job he didn’t like,” Brind’Amour said. When his father would leave, Rod would roll out of bed and head down to the basement to use an old set of weights they had in the house. That’s where both his physique and his work ethic were born.
Every Hurricanes player has a story about getting to their facilities early and finding their coach has already been crushing the weight room, including in the offseason.
“I stay here every summer. We usually were starting at 8 a.m. and he’s in there already, grinding,” defenseman Jalen Chatfield said.
“It’s almost like a cliché thing at this point. You see him working out. You see him walk around, how muscular he still is. It’s pretty impressive,” defenseman Sean Walker said. “He makes you want to stay on your toes and make sure you’re in tip-top shape.”
Chatfield said it’s a novelty to have a coach with that type of physique. “I’m sure everybody knows even when he played, he was jacked,” he said. “I’ve seen the [photo] with his shirt off.”
Chatfield is talking about one of the most iconic offseason Stanley Cup celebration photos of all time, right up there with Sidney Crosby sleeping next to it. In 2006, Brind’Amour brought the Cup back to Campbell River. He took the Cup on a nature hike and posed “tarps off” with it, muscles bulging next to a roaring river, gripping the chalice with two hands while wearing black shorts and sandals.
It’s one of the images that launched Brind’Amour’s nickname in hockey circles. Incidentally, Hurricanes players uniformly say they have never called him “Rod The Bod” to his face.
“I’d be too scared. He’s a little intimidating,” Blake said.
They’re also not looking to challenge their coach on the weight bench.
“No chance. You’re going to lose that one,” center Mark Jankowski said.
Brind’Amour played in the NHL for 20 seasons after being drafted ninth by the St. Louis Blues in 1988. He played one season at Michigan State before joining the Blues in the 1988-89 playoffs for five games. The Blues traded him to the Flyers in 1991, where he spent nine successful seasons, back when Tulsky was a nascent sports fan in Philadelphia.
Brind’Amour joined the Hurricanes in a 2000 trade that brought big center Keith Primeau to the Flyers. He has been synonymous with Carolina ever since.
There are few people in the NHL who can claim influence over a franchise’s success like Brind’Amour can with the Hurricanes. Maybe Mario Lemieux with the Penguins, where he won two Cups as a player and three more as an owner. Or Joe Sakic, a two-time Cup winner as an Avalanche player who built a third Cup winner as general manager.
The case for Brind’Amour: Since the Hurricanes moved to Carolina from Hartford in 1997, they have won 104 playoff games, including Game 6 against Vegas on Sunday. Brind’Amour has been involved in 102 of them — 63 as the coach and 39 as a player — and now has two Stanley Cup wins.
His No. 17 hangs from the rafters in Raleigh, having been retired in 2011.
“This organization means a lot to me. It’s my home. It’s the place where I feel comfortable and I want to make it special again.”
That was Brind’Amour in 2018, before his first season as Hurricanes coach. Coach Paul Maurice, who would later win two Stanley Cups with the Florida Panthers, brought Brind’Amour on as an assistant coach with the Canes in 2011. He worked under Kirk Muller and Bill Peters before being promoted to head coach in Dundon’s first year as owner, after Carolina had missed the playoffs for nine straight seasons.
“Everything I think about the way the world should be, how people should treat other people, how they should lead, this man does it,” Dundon said when announcing Brind’Amour as the franchise’s 14th coach. “He’s probably the best asset we had here.”
That proved to be true. Since Brind’Amour took over in 2018, the Hurricanes are second only to Colorado (.665) in regular-season points percentage, at .659. Carolina made at least the second round of the playoffs in seven of his eight years behind the bench, and made the Eastern Conference finals four times before breaking through to win the Stanley Cup this season. He won the Jack Adams Award as NHL coach of the year in 2021.
Brind’Amour became a coveted coach during his tenure with the Hurricanes, perhaps no more so than in 2024, when he was in the final year of his deal. Luke DeCock of the Raleigh News & Observer wrote, “Confidants say he has become unsure about his future in Carolina, according to sources familiar with those conversations.” Dundon rejected that and said a deal was “all but done.”
In May 2024, Brind’Amour signed a long-term extension. “We hope to keep him a Hurricane for life,” Waddell said.
Dundon and Brind’Amour have had an intriguing relationship. At the time of Brind’Amour’s hiring, there was some concern that Dundon — a maverick new NHL owner, who has since disrupted the NBA as the owner of the Portland Trail Blazers — would meddle too much with the on-ice product. It was something of which Brind’Amour was cognizant.
“Tom’s going to want to be involved in everything. He’s going to be down in the coach’s office every day that he’s around. And that’s OK. We talked about it. I get this is how it’s going to work,” Brind’Amour told ESPN in 2018. “I’m just going to have to show him why [we shouldn’t] do what he wants to do. He wants to put a guy in and play him here, and everyone knows it’s not the best decision, I gotta show him why. I gotta let him know, and then he’s fine.”
That level of communication has been key for the Hurricanes, especially during the Tulsky/Brind’Amour era.
“Rod, Tulsky and Tom Dundon are the head honchos. They make the end decisions. But together, they’re able to figure out what the best team going forward on the ice is. They’re not too proud to say, ‘You’re wrong,’ and they’re not too proud to say, ‘OK, tell me why,’” said Justin Williams, a three-time Stanley Cup champion who is now a senior adviser to Tulsky.
“I think one of the best things about our organization is that nobody takes themselves too seriously. There’s not one person who says, ‘You’re absolutely wrong, you don’t know what you’re talking about,’ even though it might be a different idea. Everyone is confident in how a team should be built and what we need as a team. But you’re not too proud to listen to other people’s opinions. That’s what our organization is about.”
The only thing that rivals Brind’Amour’s communication is his motivation.
BEFORE EVERY GAME, Brind’Amour walks into the Hurricanes’ locker room, does a short video tutorial and then becomes a motivational speaker. Walker sits in his stall, marveling not only at his coach’s delivery, but that no two speeches are ever the same.
“I don’t know if I’ve been around someone who can just pop off with a different motivational speech every night. They make you ready to run through a brick wall for your teammates and your brothers,” Walker said.
Stanley Cup Final hero Jordan Staal has been with the Hurricanes since 2012 and has been their captain since 2019. He happily conceded the pregame oratory responsibilities to Brind’Amour.
“He’s much better than I am, that’s for sure,” Staal said. “He’s a great motivator obviously, and just true to his word. We all want it so bad and you can tell he wants it for us too.”
Brind’Amour does put some pressure on himself to say the right thing before the game — even if the results don’t follow.
“I have to prepare. I don’t like winging it too much,” he said. “Sometimes I have the best [speeches] and we don’t play that great.”
When Brind’Amour decided to become a coach, he admittedly thought it was going to be an easier life in hockey than as a player. Imagine his surprise when he found out his workload had practically doubled, thanks to the time commitments of running a team.
“Not that I didn’t respect the coaches, but I just thought you get the best players out there and go play. Open the door, let us go,” he said. “And then I got behind there and I realized, ‘Oh, wait, there’s a lot of work.’”
Every postseason can present unexpected challenges. But during this run to the Stanley Cup, Brind’Amour was faced with a situation that no NHL coach had to navigate for 107 years.
The Hurricanes’ sweep of Philadelphia combined with Montreal needing seven games to dispatch Buffalo meant that Carolina had 11 full days off between series, the longest gap in the Stanley Cup playoffs since 1919.
“It was a challenge to stay sharp,” he said. “Knowing we’re going to have so much time, you don’t want to give them too much, because the playoffs are a mental drain. It’s every night. Sometimes you’re just like, ‘Holy mackerel.’ To get away from that is good, but you also don’t want to get too far away from it, because then you get out of the [hamster] wheel, so to speak.”
Brind’Amour already had a plan. He gave the players a few days off the ice — a nice benefit for Walker and Miller, who both welcomed babies into their lives during the playoffs. They had plenty of video work, and then, when the time was right, rigorous on-ice sessions to keep them sharp.
After a rusty Game 1 that saw Montreal hand the Hurricanes their first loss of the postseason, Carolina’s fresh legs and clear heads led to four straight wins and the first Eastern Conference title in Brind’Amour’s coaching career.
“This is where we thought we should be for a long time. It’s been a long road, and I was thrilled for the guys to have this opportunity,” Brind’Amour said.
“A lot of years, a lot of pain,” Martinook said. “For Roddy to have the scar tissue that we all have too, I’m happy for him as much as I’m happy for all of us.”
There are different ways for coaches to motivate players, some more laudable than others. Defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere said Brind’Amour’s no-frills approach to his players led them to success.
“He doesn’t care about mind games. You always know where you stand with Roddy. And if you put your best foot forward, work hard and do what you’re told, he’s going to like you,” he said.
But beyond that, he’ll care about you. And your teammates. And your family.
“Roddy’s a great human being. He cares so much about our families and what’s going on,” Gostisbehere said. “After wins, we all bring our kids in. He always says the same thing, every time: ‘This is what it’s all about.’”
As the Hurricanes and their families celebrated on the Vegas ice, so did their coach, whose 20-year wait between Stanley Cups ended with the knowledge that all that scar tissue he accumulated as a coach was worth it. And so did their general manager, whose unprecedented journey to running an NHL team ended with his name forever etched on its most hallowed artifact.
“Eric pulled all the strings the right way. The guys that we have in the locker room, we love each other. We care for each other,” goalie Brandon Bussi said. “And Rod is like family. He’s the reason everyone just enjoys each other. Then we go out there and we play our game freely.”
This was their team. This was their championship.
The Carolina Hurricanes’ yin and yang, creating perfect harmony.