By David Glenn
North Carolina Sports Network
(last updated May 21, 2026)

Good news: On Thursday, the Carolina Hurricanes will begin play in the Eastern Conference championship series for the fourth time in the eight-year tenure of head coach Rod Brind’Amour.

Bad news: The Hurricanes went a combined 1-12 in those three recent trips to the Eastern Conference half of the National Hockey League’s annual “Final Four” bracket, with their short-series playoff eliminations sometimes (click HERE for the similarities/differences/details) coming right after convincing victories over their first- and/or second-round playoff opponents.

“Here we are,” Brind’Amour said last week. “We’ve got to find a way to get that next step, and that’s obviously easier said than done.”

In 2019, the Canes lost four straight ECF games to the Boston Bruins. In 2023, after a brilliant regular season, the Canes suffered another ECF sweep, this time at the hands of the Florida Panthers. Last year, the Panthers eliminated the Canes again, 4-1 this time, on their way to capturing the Stanley Cup.

Heading into the Hurricanes’ ECF series against Montreal (which won all three regular-season matchups against the Canes), there are at least a couple of obvious questions worth asking.

What went wrong during those disappointing, later-round playoff exits of 2019, 2023 and 2025?

Also, what might be different this time?

The most obvious common thread in Carolina’s lopsided defeats against the 2019 Bruins, 2023 Panthers and 2025 Panthers was that the team simply stopped scoring enough goals.

Collectively, in those previous three ECF series (13 total games), the Hurricanes were outscored by an ugly 48-21 margin, meaning they averaged only about 1.6 goals per game.

The 2019 result was by far the most predictable.

The Canes had finished only fourth in the Metro Division and seventh in the Eastern Conference during the regular season, and they were huge underdogs against Boston. Moreover, they had posted merely average offensive numbers all year, with only two players (Sebastian Aho and Teuvo Teravainen) accumulating more than 53 points during the 82-game regular campaign. When veteran Bruins goalie Tuukaa Rask turned into the league’s hottest netminder that spring, Brind’Amour simply had no buttons left to push.

The 2023 ECF sweep was the toughest for Caniac Nation to digest simply because, along with the 2022 Hurricanes (a 116-point club that lost to the New York Rangers in a seven-game, second-round series), the 2023 Carolina team may have been the franchise’s best since the legendary 2006 Stanley Cup champs.

The 2023 Canes were among the best defensive squads in the NHL, with three reliable defensive pairings blending nicely with Brind’Amour’s usual team-wide, suffocating, yield-minimal-space approach, and this time they were above-average offensively, too. They again ran into a brilliant goaltender — this time Florida veteran Sergei Bobrovsky — but their own Frederik Andersen was one of the NHL’s top postseason goalies that year, as well. In the end, though, the Panthers won four straight tightly contested matchups by one-goal margins (3-2 in four overtimes and 2-1 in another OT game in Raleigh, then 1-0 and 4-3 at Florida), leading to Brind’Amour’s infamous quote in the immediate aftermath.

“The unfortunate part of this is, looking back, everyone’s going to say ‘You got swept,’ and that’s not what happened,” Brind’Amour said then. “I watched the games. I’m there. I’m cutting the (video). We’re in the game. We didn’t lose four games … we got beat, but we were right there. This could have gone the other way, could have been four games the other way.”

Last year, the Canes were eliminated in far more convincing fashion, although they did win one game.

With high-scoring options everywhere and Bobrovsky again outstanding in net, Florida outscored Carolina 21-10 in the five-game series. The Canes’ lack of scoring depth once again was exposed, as only Aho, Andrei Svechnikov, Seth Jarvis and midseason acquisition Logan Stankoven (pictured above) scored more than three goals over the team’s 15 postseason games.

Only time will tell, of course, but several factors suggest things will be different for the Hurricanes in the ECF this year.

For starters, Carolina had the best record (53-22-7, 113 points) in the Eastern Conference this season. (None of the franchise’s three other recent ECF participants had accomplished that feat.) Only the Colorado Avalanche (55-16-11, 121 points), who are now battling Vegas in the Western Conference finals, were better. The Canes’ regular-season brilliance gives them home-ice advantage against Montreal.

The Hurricanes also are the hottest team in the NHL. Since March 31, their record is 15-1-1, and they have outscored their opponents 62-33 in that span. They are a perfect 8-0 in the playoffs, having swept Ottawa and Philadelphia in their first- and second-round series, respectively. Again, none of those other recent Carolina teams dominated the first two rounds to that degree. If momentum matters, it’s definitely on Carolina’s side.

Third, this time it might be the Hurricanes who have the hottest goalie in hockey at exactly the right time. Andersen’s 8-0 postseason record includes a minuscule 1.12 goals against average, a stellar .950 save percentage and a league-best 11.2 “goals saved above expected,” an advanced-analytics number that factors in the degree of difficulty of the shots a goalie has faced. Only one other netminder still playing (Montreal’s Jakub Dobes, at 11.1 GSAE) is above 4.2 in the same category during the 2026 playoffs.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, given both their recent postseason history and some fair questions about the quality of Carolina’s opponents earlier in this year’s playoffs, these Canes also offer much more scoring depth than those three ECF predecessors.

The team’s 296 goals during the 2025-26 regular season ranked second in the NHL (behind only Colorado) and set the franchise’s all-time record, surpassing the 286 regular-season goals of the 2005-06 squad, which of course went on to capture the Stanley Cup.

The Hurricanes had the most 20-goal scorers in the entire league during the regular season, with seven: Jarvis (32), Svechnikov (31), Aho (27), offseason acquisition Nikolaj Ehlers (26), Jackson Blake (22), Stankoven (21) and team captain Jordan Staal (20). For comparison, the 2019 Canes had only four such players, the 2023 Canes just three, and the 2025 Canes only four.

When the Canes’ second-round series ended, the 23-year-old Stankoven was tied for the league lead with seven goals (despite playing in only eight games). Taylor Hall (three goals, nine assists), a 34-year-old seasoned veteran who was the league’s 2018 MVP, and the 22-year-old Blake (four goals, seven assists) were tied for fifth and seventh in points with 12 and 11, respectively. Offseason acquisition K’Andre Miller ranked among the top 10 defensemen in postseason points, with six.

Not one of those guys was among the team’s top point producers during the regular season — that impressive list begins with Aho (80), Ehlers (71), Svechnikov (70) and Jarvis (66) — suggesting that, this time, the Canes are much less likely to run out of goal-scoring firepower when it matters most.