How the Stars Can Get Closer to a Stanley Cup in the Next Season, and in the Next Two Weeks

There's work to be done, as always

Two Stanley Cup champions.

I don’t know about you, but watching the Carolina Hurricanes celebrating their Stanley Cup win last night was pretty cool. It’s still weird to hear Taylor Hall talked about as some kind of wizened veteran, but I suppose none of us is as young as we once were.

You might have forgotten it in Carolina’s utterly dominant 16-3 run to Cup glory, but they were, until this year, one of those teams whose playing style, it was said, “doesn’t win in the playoffs.” This year, they proved that nobody is a winner, right up until they are.

In the USA, we tend to root for underdogs. This isn’t the case everywhere in the world, but for reasons cultural or historical or what have you, there’s no denying the mass appeal of seeing David slay Goliath. Every movie arc more or less operates this way, with a second act that breaks down the protagonist, showing why their strengths might not be enough to actually get the job done. For a moment, the film’s job is to make you think that the evil boxer/corporation/office copier just might win.

This isn’t exactly a new experience, to put it mildly.¹ Inevitably in sports, most teams encounter a point where it feels like all the work they’ve done won’t be enough to win. All the sacrifices and strategy look and sound great, but 31 of 32 teams wind up having to do postmortems with very difficult questions.

But the Hurricanes have long been a unique team, and they’ve grown even more so under former SB Nation blogger Eric Tulsky.² As a result, they’ve been the subject of every kind of narrative you could imagine for a long time now.

For example, even now, you’re hearing how the Hurricanes are proof that teams don’t have to get a superstar player to win a Cup—something that was being debated heavily in Dallas right up until a certain trade in March 2025.

Except, the Hurricanes did go out and get a superstar player (or two, if you count Jake Guentzel the year before). The same player, in fact, that the Stars themselves would get after Tulsky quickly recognized that Mikko Rantanen wasn’t a fit in their system and wouldn’t be re-signing in Carolina. So he flipped him for Logan Stankoven and a haul of draft picks, and the conventional wisdom was that Dallas had accelerated their timeline at the expense of the future, while Carolina had done the opposite.

But don’t let the Rantanen saga’s final chapter fool you, because both Jim Nill and Tulsky traded a great player and other pieces to get Rantanen. Philosophically, there’s a decent level of alignment there, I would say. The Hurricanes very much were trying to acquire and get a star-caliber winger for the last two seasons, but when one of them left for free agency (Guentzel) and the other informed them early on that he was likely to do the same (Rantanen), Tulsky didn’t waste time. The Hurricanes wound up with Stankove, K’Andre Miller, and Nikolaj Ehlers instead of Guentzel or Rantanen, and it proved to be enough for them to win a championship.

The Stars angle on all this is a little different than you might expect, though. Because I don’t think the solution here is for the Stars to stop doing what they’re doing and start doing what the Canes are doing, or at least not wholesale. Because the great thing about philosophy is that it’s never too late to learn something new.

I think the Stars Stars can do a couple of things to position themselves as well as the Hurricanes have. So, let’s go over what those two things are, starting with one long-range thing before getting into the next two weeks.