The Canes Were in a Death Spiral. Now They’re Hot.

Every seat was full at Lenovo Center again on May 5 to see the Carolina Hurricanes in the second game of the second round of the NHL playoffs. Every beer skate—a plastic mug fillable with beer, soda, or candy—sold out in their debut that night, all 4,687 of them at $31 a pop, the team’s latest promotion to go instantly viral. 

The Hurricanes beat the Philadelphia Flyers in overtime, their sixth straight win of the postseason. Sports-bro-whisperer Pat McAfee even spoke reverently of the Hurricanes on his show the next day, priceless publicity for a franchise that spent most of its existence being mocked for that very existence.

In every aspect of the game of professional sports—financially, virally, and, most important, competitively—the Hurricanes seemingly can’t lose. There’s not a team left in the postseason that’s ever beaten them in the playoffs; all their frequent nemeses have been wiped from the slate. They’ve won all eight playoff games this year, and are eight wins from a second Stanley Cup. After 29 years in North Carolina, they’ve become a model Sun Belt franchise in a city that wasn’t exactly screaming out for a major league hockey team, run now by a hands-on owner and a general manager with a chemistry Ph.D.

These are good days to be a hockey fan in the Triangle. The thing is, that was also true 15 years ago. The Hurricanes were in this position once before and threw it all away.

The team’s recent success and rebirth came at the end of a decade-long playoff drought that cast the franchise’s future in Raleigh into considerable doubt, squandering much of the hard work the team did to put down roots in the market. That breakthrough Stanley Cup championship in 2006 became a campfire tale older fans would tell to bore the kids, less relevant with each passing year of bad hockey and empty seats.

The Hurricanes probably shouldn’t still exist in their current form. They survived perhaps because Gary Bettman, the NHL commissioner who steered original owner Peter Karmanos to move the team here in the first place, refused to back down from the bet he placed on the Triangle. 

He was right about that. The fan base the team built during an improbable, miraculous playoff run in 2002, that survived a lockout that wiped out an entire season, that grew exponentially during the 2006 championship run, it never died—it was just dormant. 

New owner Tom Dundon, who committed to putting a competitive team on the ice when he took over in 2018, breathed new life into it. The kids who watched the Hurricanes win the Stanley Cup in 2006 have families and disposable income of their own now. They’ve never known anything else. 

From Laughingstock to the Cup

It all started when what is now the Lenovo Center was just a hole in the ground next to Wade Avenue and Karmanos needed a new home for his Hartford Whalers. A self-made software magnate, “Ponytail Pete” had his interest piqued by Raleigh’s quixotic bid for an NHL expansion team in 1996, but the team would have to play in Greensboro while the arena—originally intended for N.C. State basketball before a pivot to accommodate hockey—was completed. 

The two years in the Triad were a disaster. The team’s new mascot, Stormy the Ice Hog, nearly suffocated inside a Zamboni while making his debut, a triumphant reveal turned macabre. Without a dedicated fan base willing to make the drive in traffic, the Hurricanes played to crowds of a few thousand if not hundreds most nights. They were a laughingstock.

There was buzz around the shiny new building in the fall of 1999, but by the time Halloween rolled around the next year, interest in the team had all but bottomed out. Officially, the announced crowd of 7,016 that Tuesday night remains the lowest in the team’s Raleigh history outside the COVID season of 2021. Unofficially, it was fair to wonder how the team was going to survive.

“At that time, I was thinking, ‘This is crazy. How is this going to ever work?’” said Chuck Kaiton, the Hall of Fame radio broadcaster who moved with the team from Hartford.

It’s almost impossible now, given the excitement that surrounds the team every April, to convey the apathy toward the Hurricanes as they opened the playoffs in 2002. But with each successive win, Hurricanes flags multiplied on cars in the Triangle. As the Hurricanes reached the Stanley Cup finals before falling to the powerful Detroit Red Wings, what had been a sideshow in a market obsessed with college basketball became a unifying force, a single rope that fans of N.C. State and North Carolina and Duke could all pull together.

Transplants ditched their old hockey allegiances. Natives embraced a new sport.

Those memories were still fresh in the spring of 2006, even after two years out of the playoffs and an entire season lost to a lockout as players and owners fought over a salary cap. The Hurricanes made it all the way to Game 7 of the finals against the Edmonton Oilers at home with the Stanley Cup in the building, unboxed and polished. The crowd stood and screamed for the entire 60 minutes and long after, as captain Rod Brind’Amour ripped the Cup out of Bettman’s hands to hold it aloft before the commissioner was even done with his speech.

They went on another run in 2009, making the conference finals, and those three playoff runs established the Hurricanes in the hockey world. If nothing else, they introduced ACC-level tailgating to hockey at the same time the sport introduced itself to the Triangle.

“In the back of your mind, there’s always this question about whether the market will warm up to the sport, since it’s not native to the area and it has to compete against ACC basketball and football and all of the rest,” said Harvey Schmitt, who played a key role in bringing the team to Raleigh as the longtime CEO of the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce. “[In the early years], even though we may have been sort of muddling through, we weren’t necessarily breaking through the noise to be a compelling case. … After ‘02, and certainly after ‘06, you’re going, ‘This is going to make it here.’”

All of that was on full display in January 2011, when the Hurricanes successfully hosted the NHL All-Star Game. It was a moment to take stock. The Hurricanes had never seemed more entrenched, nor their foundation more solid.

Then they choked at home in the final game of that season with a postseason berth on the line. The drought would last a decade, and everything that seemed certain in 2011 was again in doubt by 2018.

‘It Was Very Discouraging’

Few people in the Triangle paid attention when Thomas Thewes died in 2008. Thewes was a co-founder of Compuware, the company that made Karmanos his money, and he’d gone along with Karmanos on his hockey adventures as a silent partner. But Compuware made software for mainframe computers, not exactly a growth industry in the 21st century. 

Karmanos was already stretched thin financially, and the Thewes estate wasn’t interested in a minority interest in an NHL team, let alone funding ongoing operating losses. Karmanos sold a small chunk of the team to 10 local investors in 2011 to raise funds, but without ceding any control. By 2016, he had been sued by his adult sons, who alleged he raided their trust funds to pay the bills.

The ongoing capital crunch had extraordinary competitive impacts on the Hurricanes. They went from the middle of the pack in payroll to the bottom, by 2016 spending the minimum to remain in compliance. Losing season followed losing season. 

Jim Rutherford, the team’s general manager for its entire time in North Carolina, retired in 2014, only to pop up two months later with the Pittsburgh Penguins and a budget at the top of the salary cap to win two more Stanley Cups. His replacement, Ron Francis, a Whalers star and the Hurricanes’ first big free-agent signing in 1998, struggled under the same constraints, as well as his own bizarre inability to make a single player-for-player trade. Instead, he picked up other teams’ leftovers and dumped salaries for draft picks.

“It was very discouraging to me,” Kaiton said. “There were many nights where I was starting to lose my enthusiasm for doing these games. It wasn’t because I was in my 60s, because I always wanted to do it. It was just getting to be a chore, as far as realizing they really weren’t going anywhere with the way they were doing things.”

These were dark years. Brind’Amour was stripped of the captaincy in the middle of the 2010 season. Cam Ward and Eric Staal, two heroes of 2006, became franchise scapegoats, lambasted by disgruntled fans for failing to lift an underpowered team back into the playoffs. Rutherford’s attempt to jump-start the franchise in 2012 by trading for Staal’s brother Jordan didn’t work; the two never made the playoffs in four seasons together. Francis traded for a few useful players and had some acute picks in the later rounds of the draft—current star Sebastian Aho among them—but his first-round selections, key to the success of any rebuilding, were largely wasted.

Attendance, meanwhile, plummeted. As late as 2013, the Hurricanes were still averaging more than 17,000 fans per game. By 2017, they were last in the NHL at 11,776. The team was noncompetitive and, worse, irrelevant. To his credit, Karmanos always believed in the market, but his financial constraints bled into every aspect of the franchise. The Centennial Authority, which oversees the arena, was exploring much-needed renovations in 2014 but had to put them on hold because of the ownership uncertainty.

“Looking back on it, it feels now different than I ever focused on or reflected on back then, but the phrase that pops into my head is monotonous mediocrity,” said Brent Barringer, a Cary lawyer who spent 25 years on the Centennial Authority. “Just slowly sliding downhill. Certainly not an upward or positive trajectory, after all of the amazing excitement and performance of 2002 through 2009. Inexorably negative. Year after year.”

Declining attendance led to declining revenue. Declining interest led to declining corporate support. The Hurricanes were trapped in a death spiral.

Dundon Calls the Shots

Dundon cut a controversial figure from the start, eschewing suits and ties for athleisure and baseball caps. The Dallas billionaire made his fortune in sub-prime auto finance, played pickup basketball with former Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, was a primary investor in high-tech Topgolf, and had been looking for a major-league team to buy and run his way. 

The deal closed in January 2018, as Dundon shot hoops on N.C. State’s court while waiting for the wire to clear. Karmanos would remain a minority owner, but Dundon would call the shots. Within a few months, he’d fired both Francis and coach Bill Peters, while empowering Eric Tulsky, the hockey analytics guru he inherited from Francis who is now the general manager. The Hurricanes had never worn the old Whalers gear, beloved by hockey fans; Dundon put that in motion. 

Over the next few years, Dundon cut costs behind the scenes. He let Kaiton and TV play-by-play man John Forslund go while hockey insiders criticized his refusal to pay the going rate for coaches and GMs, a debate repeating itself in the NBA now after Dundon bought the Portland Trail Blazers. 

But on the ice? The Hurricanes’ payroll, 30th out of 31 NHL teams when Dundon bought the franchise, shot up to first by 2020. No team has been more active pursuing blockbuster deals, but his biggest move was naming Brind’Amour coach and letting him establish the team’s identity the same way he had as captain of the Stanley Cup champions, giving him unusual input for a coach in personnel decisions.

The Hurricanes ended the playoff drought in Brind’Amour’s first year and never looked back. They’re one of only three teams in history to win at least one playoff round in eight straight seasons.

“All I know is, since he’s taken over, we went and paid the players,” Brind’Amour said last month. “He said, ‘What do you need?’ I said, ‘We can’t be $25 million below what everyone else is paying. That’s not going to work.’ … Now there’s all those other things behind the scenes, everyone’s talking about cutting this, that, and whatever, that’s his business. That’s just bottom-line stuff. I can only speak to what I know, and I know he wants to win.”

Emboldened by the success, fans came flooding back. Merchandise—Hurricanes and Whalers alike—flew off the shelves. The Hurricanes played a historic outdoor game at Carter-Finley Stadium in 2023 that would have seemed impossible only a few years earlier when those games were played almost exclusively in traditional hockey markets.

Corporate sponsors bought in, including Morrisville-based Lenovo, which took over the naming rights for the home arena from PNC Bank in 2024. Dundon originally bought 61% of the team with the franchise valued at $505 million, buying out Karmanos to take sole ownership in 2021. In March, he sold a 12.5% minority interest at a valuation of $2.7 billion.

“It is a testament to how hockey can put down roots and captivate a market,” Bettman said before the game at Carter-Finley. “It’s a testament to Pete Karmanos’ vision and Tom Dundon’s execution of elevating everything this franchise does on and off the ice. And it’s a testament to a generation of hockey fans.”

Meanwhile, the long-delayed renovations of the Lenovo Center are finally underway—inside and out. Dundon is developing the 80 acres of surface parking around the arena into a $1 billion infill urban center with shops, restaurants, housing, offices, and hotels, something Karmanos had the right to do but never the inclination nor the capital. Then-Raleigh mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin called it the biggest economic development in the history of the city.

As part of that agreement, the city and county allocated $300 million in tourism tax funds to upgrade the 25-year-old arena. Fans can now watch games from a new bar overlooking the ice in the upper level, while the well-heeled can spend intermissions in luxury in new suites under the stands.

That work will continue over the next two summers and conclude by adding a sleek new facade that echoes the team’s new look on the ice, a physical manifestation of a new era of hockey in the Triangle.

Editor’s note: Brent Barringer is an investor in The Assembly.