Brandon Bussi started in the Stanley Cup Final on Tuesday night, and the most interesting thing about it is that Carolina treated it like this was a reasonable thing for them to do.
Not desperate. Not improvised. Not a coin flip between a team of well-meaning idiots and whatever ruin awaits on the other side. Rod Brind’Amour consulted his goalie coach, Paul Schonfelder said “Freddie needs a little break,” and that was apparently the entire conversation. OK, so we went with the other guy. The Hurricanes then went out and won 5-3, tying the series at 2-2, and Bussi stopped 18 of 21 shots including every single one in the third period, and became only the third goalie in NHL history to win his first career playoff start in the Stanley Cup Final. The previous two were Hank Bassen in 1961 and Alfie Moore in 1938, who was reportedly found in a Toronto bar before his start, which is its own kind of reasonable.
Here is what Bussi was doing before Tuesday: watching. He had started 39 regular-season games for Carolina this year, posted a 31-6-2 record, a 2.47 GAA; he was, in the strictest technical sense, the primary starter on this team before the playoffs began. Then Frederik Andersen went on a 16-game run in the postseason, Bussi sat in a corner of the locker room in full equipment every night doing whatever backup goalies do — mental preparation, phone scrolling, the specific meditative boredom of the professional athlete on standby — and didn’t play a single minute until he came on in relief in Game 3. Then they started him in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Final.
This is what a precision instrument kept in storage looks like when you finally take it out. Not rusty; exactly the same. Calibrated and ready, as if the shelf time was itself a feature of the design. That’s the part that makes you uncomfortable about Carolina if you’re Vegas: they weren’t lucky. They knew what was in the case. They had been maintaining it all year, watching the gauges, and when Schonfelder told Brind’Amour the starter needed a rest, Brind’Amour didn’t panic or apologize or hedge. He just opened the case. The instrument played all night.
The machine metaphor holds because it has to. This organization has done this before; the storylines heading into this series were never about Carolina lacking depth. The argument was always about whether depth was enough against Vegas’s ceiling. Tuesday answered one version of that question: depth is enough when every component is actually as good as advertised. Bussi was 9-for-9 in the third period. His parents scrambled from New York to attend. He told reporters afterward that “this is what a lot of kids grow up, they dream up doing something like this” — the syntax slightly crumpled by the occasion — and Nikolaj Ehlers, who had three points on the night, said “to go out and put a performance on like that after not playing for a while is impressive.” Ehlers was being polite. What he meant was: we handed this to a guy who hadn’t played in two months and he handled it like a tune-up game.
Jordan Staal scored twice, including the game-winner in the third, and has now scored in each of the first four games of a Stanley Cup Final — the first player to do that since Mike Bossy in 1982. That’s not nothing. But it was always going to be secondary, because the Staal-scoring story and the Hurricanes-depth story are the same story; they’re the same franchise thesis running through different players. This is a team that has Mitch Marner’s record hat trick in Game 3 as the other team’s highlight and still came into Tuesday needing to win. They won. Their backup goalie made NHL history in his first career playoff start. Brind’Amour said “he was phenomenal” and moved on.
https://twitter.com/Canes/status/2013659788140519909
The backup goalie story is usually about survival; the franchise on the wrong end of an injury, scrambling and hoping. What Bussi did Tuesday was something different — not a cautionary tale about depth failing, but a legitimacy argument for Carolina’s roster-building philosophy in the first place. They claimed him off waivers in October. Undrafted. Sat him all playoffs. Deployed him in the Stanley Cup Final. The only remarkable part of this, if you squint at it long enough, is that nobody in that organization appeared to find it remarkable at all.
Game 5 is Thursday at Lenovo Center, 8 PM ET on ABC. The Hurricanes’ precision instrument is presumably back in the case.
