First round comes and goes, and the Hurricanes still have work to do
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Hurricanes traded 29th pick to Chicago, gained three later-round selections
- League-wide draft day stagnation reflected lack of teams willing to trade veterans
- With $25M in cap space, Hurricanes face urgency to upgrade aging core roster
The first round of the draft came and went and the Carolina Hurricanes aren’t any different than they were before it started, not that a player taken 29th was going to have much of a shot of making them better right away even if they had kept the pick.
The first year of the NHL’s decentralized COVID-style draft, with teams sitting at home instead of gathering in Los Angeles, offered inadvertent proof that shoving the front offices of 32 teams and every agent in the free world into close quarters in the same bars and restaurants and hotel lobbies for two days really did act as a catalyst for transactions. There were only two player trades of note Friday, along with a few minor pick swaps, the last involving the Hurricanes.
As is their wont, the Hurricanes traded down, sending the first-round pick to the Chicago Blackhawks for the second straight year to add the 34th and 62nd picks Saturday and a fifth-round pick in 2027.
“We have several players we like in this part of the draft, and we felt like we could slide down and still get one of the guys we were very high on, and then have an extra pick to hopefully pick up another one of the guys we’re looking at,” Hurricanes general manager Eric Tulsky said at the team’s draft nerve center at Lenovo’s corporate headquarters.
Tulsky said the new format actually made trade conversations easier for him during the draft, away from prying eyes and with the full involvement of the staff, but there was clearly also something to be said for the critical mass of deal-makers that used to gather around the draft.
“Obviously there’s a downside to not having the networking experience and the social activity, but in terms of actually running the draft, there’s real plus to it,” Tulsky said. “This year, it’s been a difficult year to get some of these things done because almost every team in the league right now is looking to get better. And most years, you have a few teams that are deep into rebuilds or starting rebuilds and are willing to move some of their veterans for picks. This year, almost every team is saying if they move a player, they want players back. And that makes it hard to get deals done.”
Which means a quiet offseason so far remains quiet, with the second day of the draft still to come Saturday and another two days before the free-agent window opens. Since the end of the five-game loss to the Florida Panthers, the Hurricanes have re-signed Eric Robinson and Juha Jaaska and that’s it. With $25 million in cap space to spend on, essentially, three players — although it’s probably as useful weaponized in trades as it is used on contracts — it certainly won’t stay that way for long.
In years past, the draft tended to kick off the action heading into July 1, but this year it was a damp squib across the league. Noah Dobson was the only big name to move, and the Hurricanes weren’t the only team keeping their powder dry.
That can’t last long. There’s a lot of work to do. As Sebastian Aho pointed out last month: “Everyone keeps saying we have a lot of cap space and we have assets. Hopefully we are able to take the next step in that department, too.” But that time is coming.
“I think one of the things we will see is that after July 1, teams will realize what they did and didn’t get and there may be a secondary wave of movement there,” Tulsky said. “And there may be a tertiary wave of movement during the season because every team is trying to get better now, and not all of them will.”
The Hurricanes still have three first-round picks over the next two drafts, and the value of this year’s pick, at 29, wasn’t much better than a second-rounder anyway. But they weren’t able to leverage it in a trade to acquire an NHL player, and as important as it is to keep the talent pipeline full, the Hurricanes are only getting so many kicks at the can with the current group. Jaccob Slavin is 31. Jordan Staal turns 37 this fall. Jordan Martinook is a month away from 33. Brett Pesce and Teuvo Teravainen already left as free agents. The clock is ticking.
From the team that broke through in 2019 and started this whole run, only Sebastian Aho, Martinook, Slavin, Staal and Andrei Svechnikov remain. That does suggest that what the Hurricanes have built can be sustained through considerable turnover — culture! — but it equally suggests those players are load-bearing members of that construction and the temporal imperative is slowly increasing.
Friday wasn’t the night to start moving forward, clearly, in a constipated league. But that time is coming soon. The first preseason game is less than three months away. A lot can happen between now and then. A lot has to happen between now and then.
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This story was originally published June 28, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
