Bussi’s AHL rise helps Hurricanes chase Stanley Cup, Calder Cup bids

Brandon Bussi did more than steady Carolina in a 4-2 win over Vegas. His 23 saves gave the Hurricanes a 3-2 lead in the Stanley Cup Final and turned a single goaltending performance into a bigger organizational story: Carolina’s pro pipeline is alive in both leagues at once.

That matters because Bussi’s rise did not come out of nowhere. He spent 111 regular-season games with Providence from 2022 to 2025, putting together a 63-31-12 record with a 2.62 goals-against average, a .915 save percentage and eight shutouts. He was an AHL All-Star in 2023, earned All-Rookie Team honors after his 2022-23 breakout and was named AHL Player of the Week in April 2022 after his professional debut. The guy making stops for a team on the verge of a Stanley Cup has a full AHL file behind him, and it shows why the league’s development track still matters.

Carolina’s bigger opportunity is right there in front of it. With the Hurricanes in the Stanley Cup Final and the Chicago Wolves in the Calder Cup Finals, the same hockey operation is chasing the two biggest trophies in North American pro hockey at the same time. The Wolves won the Calder Cup in 2022, and Carolina prospects also won a title with the Charlotte Checkers in 2019, so this is not a fluke. It is a system with a championship history, and Bussi’s game only sharpened that picture.

The stakes are rare enough to stand out even in a sport built on grinding seasons. If Carolina finishes the job in the NHL and the Wolves do the same in the AHL, it would be the first same-season Stanley Cup and Calder Cup double since the New Jersey Devils and Albany River Rats pulled it off in 1995. That is the kind of overlap that makes the AHL impossible to separate from the NHL in June.

The 2026 Calder Cup Finals opened Friday at Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Illinois, with Toronto and Chicago starting their series while the Hurricanes were still fighting in the Stanley Cup Final. The Calder Cup championship is being televised on Sportsnet in Canada and NHL Network in the United States, with worldwide streaming on AHLTV on FloHockey. In the AHL’s 90th-anniversary season, Carolina’s path is the clearest reminder yet that the league still feeds the sport’s biggest stage.