By W.G. RAMIREZ and MARK ANDERSON AP Sports Writers
LAS VEGAS — Carolina Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour is wearing his poker face well in Las Vegas.
Brind’Amour has decided who will be in net Tuesday night against the Vegas Golden Knights in Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Final.
He’s just not telling anyone.
“It’s always a suspenseful thing around here that I have to hold on to,” Brind’Amour said Monday after practice. “It seems to have taken a life of its own, so I kind of enjoy it.”
Vegas leads the best-of-seven series 2-1 after a wild 5-4, double-overtime win on Saturday night. The teams split the first two games in Carolina.
Starting goaltender Frederik Andersen didn’t practice, which Brind’Amour described as a maintenance day, but backup Brandon Bussi was on the ice along with Pyotr Kochetkov. All three were in rotation over the first three months of the regular season.
Asked what the coaches were telling him about his chances of playing in Game 4, Bussi smirked: “You know, Rod’s our coach, right?”
Andersen was brilliant for the Hurricanes, playing every minute of their first 15 playoff games before Bussi replaced him after Vegas took a 4-0 lead after the second period of Game 3.
Bussi shut down the Knights until Shea Theodore’s game-winning shot caromed off the end boards and went in after the goaltender inadvertently deflected it with his left skate 5:38 into the second overtime.
Brind’Amour told reporters on Sunday he didn’t anticipate “a lot of changes” to the lineup, but would “see how (Andersen is) feeling.”
On Monday, the coach quashed the notion that Andersen might have suffered a head injury when Ivan Barbashev’s left hip viciously collided with the netminder’s head. Andersen dropped to the ice face-first, where he lay flat with his arms sprawled out.
Bussi, who hadn’t played since April 14 before replacing Andersen, said his mindset doesn’t change on how to prepare for a game, whether as a backup or starter.
“It’s the same thing for me every day,” Bussi said. “I put my head down, I work hard. I just do the same thing every time. It’s easier that way.”
Meanwhile, the Hurricanes said they have confidence in whoever leads the team onto the ice inside T-Mobile Arena on Tuesday night.
“Freddie has been unbelievable, Bussi’s been unbelievable this year, and Koch, before he got injured, he was incredible,” Nikolaj Ehlers said. “So we got a ton of confidence. We want to play the same hockey that we know we can play. In the end it doesn’t matter who’s in the net, we’re going to do our best to limit their chances and give them less hard work to do during the games.
“It doesn’t matter. We have full confidence in all three goalies.”
Taylor Hall said the smaller intangibles to consider might be the goaltenders’ styles of play and how to react when an explosive team such as Vegas is firing on net.
“Bussi plays an aggressive style, so I would say it’s more about taking away the other options around the ice a bit more so that he can just focus on that shot if we do give up a chance,” Hall said. “Where Freddie’s more patient, and he’s more of a, ‘let’s see what happens.’ He’s able to kind of save some backdoor plays and things like that.”
In other injury news, forward William Carrier skated at practice Monday after missing the third period and OT after appearing to injure his arm during a check on Jeremy Lauzon.
GOLDEN KNIGHTS ALREADY HISTORIC
The line to get into the Golden Knights’ practice on Monday morning stretched well outside the door at the rink, and Vegas fans have had plenty to celebrate in its team’s nine seasons.
Back in the Stanley Cup Final for the third time, the Golden Knights are two victories away from winning their second championship in four years.
Carolina will have plenty to say about whether the Golden Knights get there, and the Hurricanes will try to even the series and reclaim home-ice advantage on Tuesday night. A win by the Golden Knights puts them in a commanding position.
Hockey historian Eric Zweig said Vegas is on the short list of top expansion franchises in NHL history, and another Stanley Cup should put the Golden Knights in the conversation as the best.
“It’s hard to compare,” Zweig said. “Frankly, in a 32-team league – I guess it was only 31 when they started – anything you do now is harder than it had to have been before. It just is. There’s so many more rounds of playoffs to go through. There’s so many more teams that you have to be better than to get there.”
The Golden Knights have a locker room full of players who have lifted the Stanley Cup, and their experience is especially valuable when the goal of winning it again is so close.
“I think it goes a long way,” said forward Brett Howden, who has a playoff-leading 13 goals. “Just the experience that we have in his locker room, the leadership, the way we’ve gone through adversity, the way our team stays composed. It just speaks volumes to our locker room.”
Howden was on the 2023 team that won the Cup, but there are a number of notable players still chasing their first title. Players such as Mitch Marner, Rasmus Andersson and Tomas Hertl.
Hertl came close in 2016 with San Jose, reaching the Cup Final before losing in six games to Pittsburgh. The Sharks made the Western Conference Final in 2019 – along the way eliminating the Golden Knights in seven games – before falling to St. Louis in six games.
“In the third season when I got to the Cup, I was like, ‘I’ll be right back,’” Hertl said. “You have a couple of good runs. You have a couple of years missing the playoffs. You’re like, ‘Will it ever come again?’ You come here and it’s a great team in the first two seasons. We’ve been in the playoffs, but we never get far. And now we’re sitting there, we have two wins to the Cup Final.
“Hopefully, we finish this the right way and it will be remembered forever.”
And, likely, among the greatest expansion franchises.
Zweig said the Golden Knights already are in the company of the Philadelphia Flyers, New York Islanders and Edmonton Oilers.
• Philadelphia entered the league in the 1967-68 season and made the playoffs in its first two seasons and three of its first four. The Broad Street Bullies won the Cup in 1974 and 1975 and lost in the Final in 1976.
• New York debuted in the 1972-73 season and began a 14-year streak of making the playoffs in its third year. That included winning four Cups in a row starting in 1980.
• Wayne Gretzky-led Edmonton was part of the World Hockey Association merger with the NHL in 1979 and made the postseason in each of its first 13 years in the new league. That included five Cups over seven seasons, though the last in 1990 didn’t include The Great One, who was traded to the Kings two years earlier.
The New York Rangers and Blues are other expansion franchises that could be considered. The Rangers began play in 1926 and made the playoffs in 15 of their first 16 seasons and won three Cups. St. Louis was part of a new six-team division in 1967, and by winning it the first three years automatically made the Cup Final. The Blues were swept in all three series.
“There’s been so much expansion since the ’90s,” Zweig said. “Vegas is head and shoulders above all of those.”
The Golden Knights aren’t overly concerned about history, but they are trying to survive what has been an unexpectedly high-scoring series against the Hurricanes filled with whiplash-inducing momentum swings. The Golden Knights just as easily could be down 2-1 or even 3-0 in this series, but they overcame an early two-goal deficit in the opener and escaped in double overtime of Game 3 after blowing a four-goal lead.
“There was no panic,” coach John Tortorella said. “The only way I can explain it is (the players) get it, they’ve been there. A lot of this team has won and gone through the process of going through playoffs, and they rely on that. I think they challenge themselves. It isn’t a physical skill, it’s a mental skill, and we have that. I don’t know if we win the series, but I know we have that in this organization.”
STANLEY CUP FINAL, GAME 4
Who: Carolina at Vegas
When: Tuesday, 5 p.m. PT
Where: T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas
TV: ABC (Ch. 7)
