Workrate Hockey - June 15, 2026

I moved down to Raleigh, North Carolina, officially, On May 31st, 2006. When we came down initially to look at houses a few months earlier, I remember expecting to see more Carolina Panthers representation (sorry, dumb Yankee over here), I think, but I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of Carolina Hurricanes flags and license plates and all that.

We didn't plan on being dropped into a Stanley Cup run. So, while we tried to get a newborn to sleep, we watched as the Canes disposed of the Buffalo Sabres, then went a full seven games with the Edmonton Oilers to win their first ever Stanley Cup. As someone whose hockey fandom ebbed and flowed, I thought it was cool that the local team was winning the championship and knew the history of the team that was formally known as the Hartford Whalers and their jobber status essentially since they came into the league. I grew up watching the Whalers on occasion - the only team that I could watch on the regular 2-13 channels without cable because we were far out on Long Island so we got the Connecticut major network channels as well as the New York ones, and the Connecticut stations would occasionally throw on the Whale. But as a Islanders fan by birth and a Nordiques/Avalanche fan by choice, the Canes win was just a footnote. Good for them.

I probably would have eventually developed a Canes fandom if the team had remained good, but they did not. Missing the playoffs the following season and the season after that, the Canes would go on a run in 2008-09, but would then take an ugly turn. Yes, bandwagoner I guess, but shoe fighter Mike Milbury killed my love for the game, and my Sega Genesis was long since disappeared, so my hockey passion wasn't really that strong to pick up that little spark that the Canes had from that Cup run in '06.

Fast forward to 2013, of all times. Hockey had been through a lockout and when the NHL came back, everyone seemed starved to see action on the ice. I got caught up with it, so I wanted to take the family to a game, and asked my coworker if he had any inside sources on getting cheaper tickets (getting five seats together on the secondary market was expensive and the Canes were a decently hot ticket then), and he gifted me five seats to a Thursday night game against Toronto. We went to the game and in the first two minutes, Kevin Westgarth and Colton Orr throw down. A mohawked Joe Corvo scores the first goal. Not Cam Ward (Dan Ellis) stood on his head, and the Canes won 3-1. My kids were hooked.

The following day, I was calling the Canes about a ticket bundle they had for a handful of games that season. The ticket rep was like "you know, it wouldn't cost much more to get a partial season ticket plan". Stupid me's eyes lit up. A season ticket holder? I had only been a season ticket holder once in my life - the original XFL, where I was a season ticket holder to the NY/NJ Hitmen, one of the most miserable teams offensively that always seemed to have the worst weather when we went to games - but this imaginary status sank into me. "Season Ticket Holder." So, I bought in.

Fun side note to this story - when the ticket rep was looking at possible seat locations for my season tickets, he went through areas in the 300s. He says, and I'm not making this up, "there's 328... but that's probably a bad idea since you have kids." Those of you who know my connection with Section 328 would probably get a chuckle out of that. Anyway, back to the story.

So we became season ticket holders, and the Canes proceeded to go on a horrific 11-21-3 run the rest of the season. Despite that, when it came time to renew my partial season plan, I did the math - why pay for a partial plan over in 333 where for a similar price, I could be a complete season ticket holder in the Fan Zone? It was only $9.99 a game back then, and I could get similar seats - just on the other side of the ice. Once again, I'm an idiot, and bought in. After all, at just $20 a game, I could always sell the games I can't/won't go to. It shouldn't be that hard.

Years and years pass. The bad times got worse, as a rebuild with a team unwilling to invest in scouting and a general manager who didn't know what he was doing led to just miserable hockey. There were times, watching the team, where it looked like we were playing on the skill level where the CPU cheats and goes twice as fast and passes perfectly in order to catch up. Bill Peters shows up and instead of working with what he has tries to fit square pegs into round holes.

The only thing keeping our sanity is Canes Twitter and my friends in Section 328. Tailgates and memes are the only way through it, watching as troll accounts take pictures of our empty barn and people call on the league or new ownership to move the team to some place more "deserving", like Quebec City.

But still we muscled on, through the rumor of a sale to a Texas lawyer who had previously owned the Texas Rangers and put a lazy river in a minor league team's ballpark. That fell apart though, and the team ended up getting sold to a billionaire who made his money in subprime lending and never owned a sports team in his life.

And oh man, did that look like a shitshow. Dundon clashes with Ron Francis and Dundon pushes him out, which leads to an exodus of Francis' friends and former teammates that he had put into the organization. Bill Peters threatens to resign from his role, threatening to go to a better organization. Dundon had no desire to stop him. Now, without a head coach or a general manager and no one exactly jumping at the opportunity to join Carolina, Dundon hired people who were already there - the assistant coach and team icon Rod Brind'Amour to be head coach, and Don Waddell - who was only supposed to be running the business side of the group that owned the Hurricanes - stepped in as general manager. The team was a laughingstock with rumors going around that Dundon wouldn't pay anything close to going rates for those roles, and highly touted front office candidates very publicly taking their names out of contention after initial interviews or just flat out refusing the opportunity to interview for the role. Were we cooked?

Suddenly, things started happening. Waddell made hockey trades - trading actual players for actual players. I was at the 2018 NHL Draft in Dallas on day 2, after meeting the kid from Russia that would breathe some extra life into the franchise as an 18-year-old, when we heard the rumors of a trade developing. Fastball's "The Way" played as we heard it confirmed and our little group sang along as we learned Dougie Hamilton was going to be a Hurricane.

There was the magic of that first season under Rod. Dougie was the highest profile player the team brought in easily a decade, but there was also the Petr Mrazek/Curtis McElhinney tag team in goal (a goalie off waivers contributing to the team's success? What a concept), the theft of Nino Niederreiter from Minnesota, and just an entire team that played like a dark cloud had been pushed aside and given a path to success. The team was actually enjoying itself - surely Brind'Amour and Justin Williams had seen the morale of the team hit rock bottom under Peters - and the Storm Surge celebrations pissed off everyone who wasn't wearing Hurricanes colors. But it was the final regular season home game, with Mrazek standing on his head with 36 saves and yelling "we're in, baby!" in his postgame interview, that just brought this joy of being a Hurricanes fan that, despite later successes and playoff runs, has been unmatched.

Until now.

This one's for Kevin Westgarth.
For Jiri Tlusty.
For Bobby Sanguinetti.
For Joe Corvo.
For Anton Khudobin's Lego addiction.
For Dan Ellis trying to commit seppuku with his own skate blade.
For Nathan Gerbe and his inability to get things off of high shelves.
For Brad Malone making room for trucks.
For Andrej Nestrasil's missing front tooth.
For first line Tilda Swinton Joakim Nordstrom.
For Jay McClement and his hands of cement.
For the back of Michal Jordan's head.
For Chris Terry's fucked up Italian hero with hummus.
For James Wisniewski's 47 seconds.
For Eddie Lack's taco addiction.
For Martin Frk and Jakub Nakladal and Ty Rattie and Klas Dahlbeck and whatever random stuff we find on waivers because what the hell, right?
For Lee Stempniak being signed so we can expose him in the Vegas expansion draft, then protecting him when the draft actually came up.
For Justin Faulk's queso and children being mildly excited for him.
For Golden Corral and sugarpucks and the Fat Trick.
For building up Haydn Fleury for years only to discover... eh.
For Victor Rask losing a battle with a sweet potato.
For fucking co-captains. [Note: Not literally fucking each other - Heated Rivalry was years away]
For Scott Darling and every Twitter fight he (and his sister) caused for two years.

And for the guys who tried to pull the team through the quagmire and gave up a little joy when everything else sucked: Skinner and Teuvo and Pesce and Brock and J'Michael and Hainsey and Faulk and JWilly and Nino and Dougie and Ned and PDG and Brady and Trocheck and that one season of CTE-fueled Micheal Ferland who you haven't thought of in years until just now.

Literally, as I sat there in mostly empty barns with ushers protecting the first row of the 300s like it was the Champions Club, I couldn't fathom a championship. The playoffs in general seemed like fantasy. And now, here we are.

Today's Song of the Day is "We Are The Champions" by Queen, off their sixth studio album News of the World, released in 1977. The single would reach #4 on the Billboard Hot 100, and while never a number one single, got as high as #2 in the UK and Netherlands, and was a top 10 hit in numerous countries.

While currently often played as one single on the radio with the band's "We Will Rock You" preceding it, the original single in 1977 put "We Are The Champions" alone on the A side, with "We Will Rock You" on the B side. Likely due to "Rock You"'s short length (2:00) and "Champions" only coming in at 3:00, a five minute single seems more radio friendly, and the songs are back to back on News of the World, so it seemed like an easy fix, even if not originally released that way (a 1992 CD single release would put a "We Will Rock You / We Are The Champions" official track to back up a "We Are The Champions" release.) The song has since been adopted by sports teams after championship victories, going back as far as 1978 and Team Canada's World Field Lacrosse Championship team. It just seemed appropriate now.

We'll be back next week to take a look at the offseason and decisions the Canes have to make... of which there really isn't many. Oh, the perks of winning a Stanley Cup. See you next week.