Holding Court: Examining Hurricanes’ Latest NHL ‘Final Four’ Trip

Answering Key Questions Surrounding Hurricanes’ Latest NHL ‘Final Four’ Trip

By David Glenn

Here are four key questions and answers as the Carolina Hurricanes compete in the “Final Four,” or the Eastern Conference finals of the 2025 National Hockey League playoffs, and battle the Florida Panthers in a best-of-seven clash.

Florida leads the series 1-0, after winning Tuesday night’s opener 5-2. Game Two is Thursday (8 p.m., TNT/truTV/Max) at the Lenovo Center in Raleigh. The remaining schedule is outlined below.

The Dallas Stars and Edmonton Oilers are facing off in the Western Conference finals, with Game One (Wednesday) and Game Two (Friday) in Dallas.

#1. Haven’t the Hurricanes been ranked among the favorites to win this year’s Stanley Cup ever since the 16-team bracket got underway in mid-April?

Yes, but with only four teams remaining, that picture now looks much different.

At the beginning of the 2025 NHL playoffs, the three teams with the best Las Vegas odds to win the Stanley Cup were (in order) Florida, Colorado and Carolina.

It was a bit surprising to see the Hurricanes that high in the pecking order, because they had finished the regular season with only the 10th-best record in the league, and — unlike the Panthers, who won it all last year — they don’t have a recent Stanley Cup on their resume.

Colorado lost in the first round. Now the other two original favorites, Florida and Carolina, are facing each other in the Eastern Conference finals.

According to The Athletic (an international sports media outlet) and MoneyPuck.com (a hockey analytics website), the Panthers now are considered the favorite to win the Stanley Cup. The odds change daily.

Similarly, various hockey experts and observers — who overwhelmingly picked the Hurricanes to win in the first (against New Jersey) and second (against Washington) rounds — are mostly jumping off the Carolina bandwagon. At NHL.com, for example, 13 of the 16 prognosticators picked the Panthers to defeat the Canes prior to the start of the series.

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, Florida and Edmonton are viewed as the updated favorites, and Carolina is considered the least likely semifinalist to win it all.

Here’s the breakdown of the updated odds for the four remaining playoff teams, with the conference championship round set to continue Wednesday:

Rank/Team (Regular-Season Results) — Odds To Win Cup*
(May 21 Update)

1. Florida Panthers (47-31-4, 98 points) — 37%/38.9%
   2. Dallas Stars (50-26-6, 106 points) — 21%/25%
   3. Edmonton Oilers (48-29-5, 101 points) — 27%/17.9%
   4. Carolina Hurricanes(47-30-5, 99 points) — 15%/18.2%

*–odds from TheAthletic.com/MoneyPuck.com

#2. Aren’t the Hurricanes past the point where merely making the playoffs, or even winning their first- and second-round series, is considered a great season?

Yes.

When Texas-based billionaire Tom Dundon purchased the Hurricanes and then quickly hired franchise legend Rod Brind’Amour as the team’s head coach in May 2018, the Canes had just completed an embarrassing nine-year run (2009-10 through 2017-18) in which they didn’t make the playoffs — in an era when the postseason bracket still included more than half the league’s teams — even a single time.

Now, in the immediate aftermath of that nine-season playoff drought (one of the longest in NHL history), Carolina has made seven consecutive trips to the playoffs to begin the Dundon/Brind’Amour era. Only the Toronto Maple Leafs (nine), Colorado Avalanche (eight) and Tampa Bay Lightning (eight) have longer, active streaks of success in that regard.

Thanks in part to the Hurricanes’ two other recent trips to the Eastern Conference finals — in 2019 and 2023 — and in part to the fact that the Canes have won at least one postseason series in each of these past seven seasons under Brind’Amour (he’s the first to accomplish that feat at the start of his NHL head coaching career), there has been absolutely no “happy to be here” element to this postseason in Raleigh, among the coaches, players or fans.

While some Carolina supporters have had a “Stanley Cup finals or bust” attitude toward this year’s team, the reality is that the Hurricanes had only the fourth-best record in the Eastern Conference this season, although the three teams in front of them — Washington, Toronto and Tampa Bay — all have been eliminated from postseason play.

Against Florida, Carolina also is carrying the historical weight of its two previous Eastern Conference finals appearances under Brind’Amour, during which the team failed to win even a single game.

In 2019, the Hurricanes were swept by Boston. In 2023, they were swept by Florida, although all four games were decided by a single goal. They didn’t even have the consolation of losing to the eventual Stanley Cup winner, as the Bruins and Panthers ultimately fell to Saint Louis and Vegas, respectively, in the championship round.

This season, it would have been viewed as a massive failure if the Canes hadn’t eliminated a lesser-record, weakened-by-injury New Jersey team in the first round. It even would have been regarded as a major disappointment by most fans if the Canes had fallen in the second round to Washington, a team that has had very little postseason success over the past seven years.

Moving forward, though, the competition is much, much tougher, so anything can happen.

#3. Why are the Panthers, who had only the 11th-best regular-season record among the 16 playoff teams, considered such a dangerous team … and maybe even the favorite to win it all?In its three seasons under Paul Maurice, who previously was the head coach of the Whalers/Hurricanes for all or parts of 13 campaigns (1995-2004 and 2008-12), Florida has been the NHL’s most successful organization.

The Panthers, a 1993 expansion franchise that had been mostly irrelevant for almost three decades, advanced all the way to the Stanley Cup finals (losing to Vegas) in 2023, they won their first Stanley Cup (beating Edmonton in the finals) in 2024, and here they are among the semifinalists once again in 2025.

Although Florida had plenty of ups and downs during the 2024-25 regular season, including seven losses in its final 10 games just before the playoffs, Maurice’s current squad has boatloads of valuable playoff experience, uncommon scoring depth, plenty of grit/size/toughness and a proven veteran goaltender (Sergei Bobrovsky), among other valuable postseason commodities.

While it’s true that this defensively suffocating Carolina squad is capable of presenting the Panthers with by far their biggest offensive challenge of the postseason, it’s also true that the Panthers offer far more offensive versatility than either New Jersey or Washington, both of whom the Hurricanes eliminated in just five games.

Florida forwards Matthew Tkachuk, Sam Reinhart (team-best 39 regular-season goals), Aleksander Barkov (team-best 51 regular-season assists), Carter Verhaeghe, Brad Marchand (a March acquisition from Boston) and Sam Bennett (team-best six postseason goals) are all extremely dangerous players in the offensive zone.

The Hurricanes don’t have quite as many high-end snipers, although Andrei Svechnikov (second in the league with eight postseason goals) has been a sensational complement to fantastic forwards Sebastian Aho and Seth Jarvis in that regard so far in this year’s playoffs.

Entering the Eastern Conference finals, the Panthers also had won 12 of their last 17 head-to-head matchups against the Hurricanes, including all four games in the 2023 Eastern Conference finals and two of the teams’ three clashes during the 2024-25 regular season.

Interestingly, prior to the teams’ current series, Florida had not faced Carolina netminder Frederik Andersen — the league’s hottest goaltender (7-2, 1.36 goals against average, .937 save percentage) through the first two rounds of this year’s playoffs — in a very long time. Andersen played only 22 regular-season contests this year because of injuries, and the Panthers’ two dominant November victories over the Canes came against third-string goalie Spencer Martin.

#4. What are some other top storylines to follow for the remainder of this year’s playoffs?First, from an international perspective, there’s one hockey storyline that just won’t go away.

Although Canada is rightly considered the cradle of hockey, and seven of the NHL’s 32 teams are based north of the border, no Canadian franchise has captured the Stanley Cup since 1993 — 32 years ago.

With one (Edmonton) of the four remaining playoff teams based in Canada, and 28-year-old megastar Connor McDavid (a five-time first-team All-NHL honoree) once again playing at an insane level for the Oilers, there’s certainly a chance that this infamous drought finally will come to an end in June.

Second, 40-year-old Hurricanes defenseman Brent Burns is a highly accomplished, 21-year NHL veteran with an easily lovable personality, a season-long “playoff beard” and a unique story to tell.

According to ESPN’s “Cup Worthiness Ratings,” which are designed to identify the NHL players most deserving of raising the Stanley Cup after many years of coming up short (and sometimes coming close), Burns is by far the #1 candidate in the league this season to be embraced even by neutral fans as he continues to pursue his life-long dream.

Burns ranks 24th in NHL history with 1,497 regular-season games played, he’s competed in 131 (and counting) postseason games, and he has an active “ironman” streak of 925 consecutive regular-season games played (fourth-longest in NHL history). Now in his third season with the Canes, Burns hasn’t missed a game — because of injury or any other reason — in almost 12 years.

Finally, there is Mikko Rantanen. Now a member of the Dallas Stars, his third team in the past five months, he leads the league in goals (nine) and points (19) during the 2025 playoffs, and at this point he’s probably a co-favorite with McDavid for this year’s postseason MVP.

The Hurricanes surprised many in the hockey world when they acquired Rantanen, one of the NHL’s most accomplished point-producers, from Colorado on Jan. 24 in a three-team trade that sent Martin Necas and Jack Drury to the Avalanche and also brought Taylor Hall to Carolina.

Rantanen clearly was stunned to be traded away from Colorado, which drafted him 10th overall in 2015, and he never seemed comfortable in Raleigh. He wasn’t productive for the Canes, either. Hockey analysts questioned his fit in Carolina’s offensive and defensive systems. Fans questioned his effort.

When it became clear that Rantanen had no interest in re-signing with the Hurricanes after the season, Carolina shipped him to Dallas in exchange for 22-year-old forward Logan Stankoven and four high draft picks.

Now Rantanen has a new eight-year, $96 million contract with Dallas, and he’s doing for the Stars exactly what the Hurricanes originally hoped he would be able to do for them.

NHL Playoffs

Eastern Conference

Final

CAROLINA vs. FLORIDAGame 1: Panthers 5, Hurricanes 2
Game 2: Panthers at Hurricanes, May 22, 8 p.m. (TNT, truTV, Max)
Game 3: Hurricanes at Panthers, May 24, 8 p.m. (TNT, truTV, Max)
Game 4: Hurricanes at Panthers, May 26, 8 p.m. (TNT, truTV, Max)
Game 5: Panthers at Hurricanes, May 28, 8 p.m. (TNT, truTV, Max), if necessary
Game 6: Hurricanes at Panthers, May 30, 8 p.m. (TNT, truTV, Max), if necessary
Game 7: Panthers at Hurricanes, June 1, 8 p.m. (TNT, truTV, Max), if necessary

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David Glenn (DavidGlennShow.com, @DavidGlennShow) is an award-winning author, broadcaster, editor, entrepreneur, publisher, speaker, writer and university lecturer (now at UNC Wilmington) who has covered sports in North Carolina since 1987.

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