Tag: Brandon Bussi

Raleigh

With the NHL season approaching the end of its first gradable quarter, it’s fair for onlookers to start pulling out the No. 2 pencils to fill in the test ovals — and perhaps fill out a holiday wish list while they’re at it.

A torrent of injured defenders has made it nearly impossible to truly tell what the Carolina Hurricanes are in 2025-26, while simultaneously cranking the wheel of the in-season trade target rumor mill.

After Saturday night’s 4-3 overtime loss to the Edmonton Oilers at Lenovo Center — the second of back-to-back games at home before a four-game road swing — the team’s needs remain much the same as they did in Week 1.

If the Hurricanes’ early-season trials and tribulations have done nothing else, they’ve perhaps prematurely outed Carolina as an organization with a glut of young defensive depth. If the Canes were hoping to mask that depth as a bargaining position for future trade talks or contract negotiations, the team’s three dozen man games lost to injury on the blue line alone — and the team’s subsequent success — have eradicated that line of thinking.

Saturday, the Canes started a third consecutive game with the same six defenders, their second-longest stretch of consecutive games with the same grouping this season. Shayne Gostisbehere again found the scoresheet, earning his 11th assist of the season, and the group acquitted itself well overall.

Ditto up front, where Eric Robinson and William Carrier each missed significant time with simultaneous, unrelated injuries. No problem: In stepped Bradley Nadeau. Veteran Mark Jankowski came out of the press box, and a stable of young forwards — like Felix Unger Sorem — awaits in Chicago, hoping to follow similar paths to those of Charles Alexis Legault, Joel Nystrom and Dominic Fensore.

Jankowski was back in the lineup Saturday after an injury to Jesperi Kotkaniemi on Friday, and Nadeau was back in the building, in case Seth Jarvis was unable to go after his injury scare against Vancouver.

On the scoring front, Robinson found the net, Carrier added an assist on a Jordan Staal goal, and Nik Ehlers continued his strong rebound to a slower start to the season with his fourth goal.

None of the above had an answer for the Oilers’ big guns. Connor McDavid had a pair of goals and an assist on the OT winner. Leon Draisaitl had that game-winner and two assists.

Hurricanes goalies, by the numbers

But what do we make of the Hurricanes’ goaltending to date?

Here are the raw numbers:

Frederik Andersen, prior to Saturday’s game, had started nine times. He had a 3.00 goals-against average and an .892 save percentage. Among 31 NHL goalies with nine or more starts, Andersen was 19th in GAA, and 24th in save percentage.

Brandon Bussi has been a breath of fresh air in the early going, a surprising waiver wire success with four wins in five starts, a 2.60 GAA and an .898 save percentage.

And Pyotr Kochetkov, injured to begin the season, has been solid since his return. In four appearances — three starts — Kochetkov is 3-0 with a 1.92 GAA and a .908 save percentage.

The numbers are fine, for sure. A cumulative 2.88 team GAA is ninth best in the 32-team NHL, which is in line with a team also sitting ninth best in shots allowed per game.

But ninth best of 32 looks a lot better than ninth best of 16, and 16 is the number that matters more — it’s how many playoff teams there will be, and a middle-of-the-road GAA isn’t typically part of a recipe for playoff success.

In the NHL playoffs, the game gets tighter. Games with final scores like 6-3, 7-4 or even 4-3 are replaced by multiple 2-1 and 3-2 games. The teams with better cumulative defense and, yes, goaltending, advance. Those who struggle in tight, low-scoring games do not.

Through 18 games this season, the Hurricanes are scoring 3.71 goals per game, third best in the NHL, and that number is propped up by the team’s opening six-game stretch — all wins — during which it scored four or more goals in each contest.

In the Hurricanes’ 12 wins this season, they’ve scored four or more goals 11 times. The Canes’ record in games in which they score fewer than four goals? 1-6.

A win is a win is a win, until the numbers turn on you.

It also doesn’t help when the Hurricanes create their own problems. Friday, two glaring defensive lapses created untenable situations for Kochetkov. Saturday, Andersen gift-wrapped the Oilers’ first goal with a direct pass to Jack Roslovic. (Nothing Andersen could do on McDavid’s power- play goal, though, nor his second of the night in the third period.)

What could the Canes do?

The luxuries the Hurricanes have in this situation, though, are twofold: They have money, and they have time.

No one worth a shred of credibility can say for certain before (American) Thanksgiving which players on which teams will for certain be available in any trade or sign-and-trade scenario, nor which teams will play ball at all. Even those teams currently sitting at the bottom of the league can point to the worst-to-Cup 2019 St. Louis Blues as a harbinger of what’s possible.

But given the Canes’ solid start to the season — they are, after all, sitting among the top five in the NHL standings — there is no urgency to make sudden moves. (And if someone in the front office did have a hair trigger, Carolina would likely already have a new defenseman in the rotation.)

The other factor to consider — eventually — is whether any possible moves actually make the team better. Acquiring the “top goalie from a team that isn’t doing well” works well in fantasy sports dynasty leagues, but not so much when term, cap space and player proclivity are factors.

Of those extraneous factors, though, cap space is the least of the Canes’ concerns. They are currently sitting on about $10 million, give or take, with only about $5 million currently tied up in the goaltending position among the three who have played games this season to date.

The Hurricanes did go back to the waiver wire and reacquire Cayden Primeau from the Maple Leafs, an ultimate boomerang move, and that addresses one kind of depth.

There is nothing in the empirical data to directly suggest that Andersen, Kochetkov, Bussi or Primeau can’t become the playoff goalie the Hurricanes need this season — Andersen and Kochetkov last season posted the second-best GAA in the NHL playoffs, for what that’s worth, and some guy named Cam Ward caught lightning in a bottle at the right time in 2006.

But there’s also nothing lost by exploring all of the team’s best options, given its positive fiscal situation and now-apparent strength and depth elsewhere in the lineup.