The Carolina Hurricanes' Stanley Cup Win Marks the End of an Era

It isn’t as if the Carolina Hurricanes are the first NHL team to employ data analysis and win a Stanley Cup. In what we know as the ‘Analytics Era’, this has been happening for years as the Florida Panthers, Colorado Avalanche, and Tampa Bay Lightning (among others) have found a lot of success, partly thanks to building out their analytics department. Panthers General Manager Bill Zito once said that he didn’t make a move unless it was approved by Sunny Mehta, who was the head of their analytics department but was recently hired to be the GM of the New Jersey Devils. The Analytics War has been over for a long time, and the only people left fighting it are like the Japanese soldiers who hid in the jungle for decades after World War II not knowing the war was over.  

But Carolina is the first Stanley Cup champion where a huge chunk of the decision-making apparatus, from the General Manager on down, was built from the Twitter hockey sphere. Eric Tulsky, the GM, got his start in hockey analytics at Broad Street Hockey, focusing often on zone entries. Tyler Dellow (fka mc79hockey), the Assistant General Manager for the Hurricanes, was an original member of the Oilogosphere, a collection of Edmonton Oilers bloggers at various sites who covered everything from data analysis to general opinion. (The Oilogosphere, as far as I know, is the birthplace of modern hockey analytics.) There were several contributions to public hockey knowledge from Dellow, but I most vividly remember his work on shift starts. Kevin Kan, Carolina’s Lead Software Developer, was known on Twitter as Datarink, and was one of the early producers of visualization to present data. For a decade, I only knew the Twitter name ‘Draglikepull’, but that is Adam Bishop, who was hired by Carolina three years ago to be a data engineer. Rhys Jessop wrote for the Canucks Army blog and is now a scout with the Hurricanes. Not every name in that decision-making apparatus is from Twitter, but many of the key names are, and that is what separates them from, say, Florida, where Zito was a player agent before heading into management.

The positions of Tulsky and Dellow are what make Carolina unique from Florida, Colorado, and Tampa Bay. Zito was an agent, Joe Sakic (GM when Colorado won their Cup) was a former player, and Julien Brisebois was a lawyer who started in the Montreal Canadiens’ legal department before working up to his role of Tampa Bay GM in 2018. Those teams built analytics departments that they actually used – building a smart analytics department and genuinely listening to what that smart analytics department has to say are two different things – but the final decisions were still in the hands of people who hadn’t built their career doing public hockey analysis. Tulsky and Dellow, as GM and AGM, built their current careers doing their work publicly, and it’s what differentiates them from every other franchise.

It does make me think of my own career. I started writing about hockey in the summer of 2011, my first post was predicting playoff teams for the 2011-12 season, and it was read by two people: my dad and my uncle. I don’t have access to that article anymore (the self-publishing site it was posted on went tits-up), but it would be accurate to say it sucked. Then an article written by Cam Charron – who was writing for the Score but went to work for the Toronto Maple Leafs and is now with the Pittsburgh Penguins – in November of 2011 changed everything (the article, like a lot of public hockey work, is now gone).

That article covered Tyler Seguin’s PDO. For the uninitiated, PDO is just adding together a team’s shooting percentage and save percentage when a player is on the ice, usually expressed at 5-on-5. A player with a PDO above 1.000 was considered ‘lucky’ and would regress downward, and a player with a PDO below 1.000 was considered ‘unlucky’ and would regress upward. (We now know that style/skill at the team and player level influences PDO, so it’s not as simple as lucky or unlucky, but this was also 15 years ago.) PDO was created publicly by Brian King (who sadly passed away in 2025) and at the time, was a barometer for luck. The article from Charron, posted on November 26^th, 2011, stated how Seguin’s PDO was telling us he was getting lucky and it would regress downward. In 21 games through November 25^th, 2011, Seguin had a +18 goal differential at 5-on-5. From November 26^th onward, Seguin had a +12 goal differential in 60 games. That is still very good, but the regression happened as Charron predicted.

I was hooked. From that point on, I read as much as I could about the ongoing analytics renaissance. Then the 2011-12 Los Angeles Kings, from the 8-seed in the Western Conference, won the Stanley Cup. We didn’t have expected goals then, but the Kings were near the top of the league by Corsi share at 5-on-5, and that was the predictor for their success. It happened, and there was no turning back.

Fast forward 14 years, and here we are. I have been able to carve out a (very modest) living writing and doing videos about fantasy hockey, and it would not be possible without all the public work that has been done. Starting with the Oilogosphere, moving to the full revolution in the 2010s with names like Tulsky, Charron, Lukan, Hohl, Toumi, Stimson, and the list goes on. Dozens (hundreds?) of public analysts, and while not all went to work for NHL teams, many of them did, and the 2026 Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes are the fruits of their labour. It doesn’t matter if they work for Carolina or not, the Hurricanes are a Cup-winning team built by Hockey Twitter. That is remarkable.

Carolina’s championship also marks the end of an era. All the accumulated knowledge over a span of 20 years culminated in a Stanley Cup for a team that, coincidentally enough, won their last Stanley Cup 20 years ago. It doesn’t mean there still isn’t a lot of public work being done, and once the NHL decides to release all its modern player tracking data – they’ve been kicking that can down the road for years now – there will be another revolution. But it won’t be the same as the one that built not only the Cup-winning Hurricanes roster, but the modern NHL as we know it. Teams already have that player tracking data, so even though there might be some useful analysis done publicly, a lot of it has been done, and will be done, for individual teams behind closed doors.

It does make me a bit wistful, but it’s also hard not to crack a smile about all this. Seeing a group of bloggers, whose influence led me to where I am, reach the pinnacle of the NHL thanks not only to their work, but the work done by dozens (hundreds?) of people over the span of two decades, all posted publicly for the benefit of understanding the game we love, is a magical thing. It is knowledge built on knowledge built on knowledge, and it’s doubtful we’ll see anything like this again.