All Time Carolina Hurricanes Team

Originally published: 5/9/2020

Original post: https://coalm.blogspot.com/2020/05/all-time-carolina-hurricanes-team.html

Decided to curate a Carolina Hurricanes All Time Team. To start the process, I felt like I needed some rules/criteria or else this would be chaos. I started with hockeydb.com and get a list of all the players that ever played for Carolina. Next I ordered the players by Games Played, highest to lowest and started there. Right away, you can see the easy all timers, such as Eric Staal (909 GP), Glen Wesley (729 GP), Rod Brind'Amour (694 GP), and Cam Ward (668 GP). However, using this method will only take you so far. Quickly, you will notice that there are some players with high GP numbers that you may not want on your All Time team (Craig Adams, Patrick Dwyer), so obviously I need to go to the POINTS. My thinking was that you had to have a decent amount of GP for CAR for starters, but you had to contribute on the score sheet. That is where I tried to get Sebastian Aho on the list. He may not have the highest amount of games, but he did play 100% of his NHL games for CAR, plus his Points/Game ratio warrants adding him. Players started to fall into place, except there were some positional oddities from HockeyDB, for example Rod Brind'Amour was listed as LW. This might have been true when he played for Philly, but while he was a Cane, Rod lined up in the middle winning faceoffs like a beast. Then there were Jeff O'Neill and Jeff Skinner, who HockeyDB listed both as Centers. They both moved around a bit from line to line, but I remember both of them as wingers. This allowed me to take some liberties with some lines and I don't care enough to lose sleep over it. You may notice that I lumped all the Defensemen together because I was definitely not going to fret over RD/LD designations. Finally, I had to make tough decisions at the end to fill out the team. The "tie-breaker" so to speak was to choose to include a player that I thought was the better Carolina Hurricane, a completely subjective and arbitrary criteria that only exists in my head. This tie breaker kept players like Joe Corvo and Joni Pitkanen off the list, who may have contributed, but did not represent what I want in a Hurricane. Without further delay, I present my All Time Carolina Hurricanes:
1st:
Eric Staal - C
Rod Brind'Amour - L
Jeff O'Neill - R
Glen Wesley - D
Justin Faulk - D
Cam Ward - G
2nd:
Ron Francis - C
Jeff Skinner - L
Justin Williams - R
Tim Gleason - D
Jaccob Slavin - D
Arturs Irbe - G
3rd:
Sebastian Aho - C
Erik Cole - L
Sami Kapanen - R
Niclas Wallin - D
Sean Hill - D
4th:
Jordan Staal - C
Ray Whitney - L
Chad LaRose - R
Last Man Out at each position:
Matt Cullen - C
Martin Gelinas - L
Tuomo Ruutu - R
Bret Hedican - D
Brett Pesce - D
Kevin Weekes - G