Tulsky's daring approach built Hurricanes into Stanley Cup champion

LAS VEGAS -- As he watched the Stanley Cup be awarded Sunday night, as he watched the ceremony he’d seen so many times before, Jason Orach found himself willing the Cup hand-off to go faster: Jordan Staal, sure. Frederik Andersen, OK. Taylor Hall, great. Sebastian Aho, let's move this along.

"I think it's the first time I've ever watched them hand out the Stanley Cup and gone, like, 'OK, yeah, enough with the players, hurry up, when are we getting to the management?'" Orach said with amusement Monday morning.

Finally, the moment arrived.

Eric Tulsky, a Carolina Hurricanes championship hat on his head and scarf draped over his shoulders, took one end of the Stanley Cup in each hand, lifting it over his head, a smile stretching across his face.

"It's incredible," Tulsky said, still on the ice Sunday night. "Truly never thought I would end up here and still don't really understand how it happened. It is unbelievable. … It's what we've been working on for so long. And to finally have it come through, you can't put it into words."

It was 11 years ago now that Tulsky and Orach, a longtime friend from the world of hockey blogging, had sat together at lunch and debated the choice that Tulsky had ahead of him: He could take the straight-line path, the expected path, the safe path, and take the job that had been offered to him at Apple, after having spent the previous two years at QuantumScape, attempting to improve car battery energy capacity by extending their life span.

Or he could go work for the Hurricanes.

He opted, of course, for hockey.

And now, 11 years after that decision, two years after being promoted to Hurricanes general manager, Tulsky had built a team that dominated this season's Stanley Cup Playoffs, going 16-3, capped by a 3-0 win against the Vegas Golden Knights in Game 6 of the Final.

"It's funny because he was working [to make] better car batteries," assistant general manager Tyler Dellow said. "I'm like, the world may well be a worse place because he decided to do this, but I'm sure happy he did."

It was a decision that will get Tulsky's name etched on the Stanley Cup.

The analytics revolution started in hockey almost two decades ago, coming from a few small corners of the internet. There, some self-proclaimed nerds started applying data to hockey in ways that hadn't quite been considered before, among them Tulsky, Orach and Dellow. And while Orach was watching Game 6 from afar, Dellow was there, on the ice, having been lured from the New Jersey Devils to the Hurricanes as assistant general manager when Tulsky was hired.

Asked what this meant, to win the Cup, to win it with Tulsky, after where they had come from, Dellow became emotional.

"You're going to get me to cry," he said.

"It's unbelievable," Dellow continued. "I've known him for almost 20 years and this was something on the internet 20 years ago, and it just kind of kept rolling. It's just magic, how you find the right people. … There's other people here who are from that, there are scouts here who had blogs, and it really is just building something differently than other people build it."

Building something differently, taking different chances.

Dellow recalled a story about Jose Mourinho, the longtime soccer manager who is set to join Real Madrid in July, and a watch he has worn, engraved on the inside with the words, "I am not afraid of the consequences of my decisions."

"Eric's the same way," he said.

It's not every general manager, after all, who would do what Tulsky has done the past few years, swinging for the fences, taking risks, without a guarantee of success. The Hurricanes, perpetually in search of a superstar, traded for Mikko Rantanen on Jan. 24, 2025, without first signing the pending unrestricted free agent to a contract extension.

It didn't work. After playing 13 games for the Hurricanes, Rantanen was traded again, on March 7, 2025, to the Dallas Stars, with whom he signed an eight-year contract. Carolina received forward Logan Stankoven, who had 16 points (11 goals, five assists) in 19 playoff games, conditional first-round picks in the 2026 NHL Draft and 2028 NHL Draft, and third-round picks in the 2026 draft and the 2027 NHL Draft.

The seeds of this championship were watered then, with the Stankoven acquisition, when the Hurricanes got forward Taylor Hall along with Rantanen in the initial three-team deal, when they then used the 2026 first-round pick to help acquire defenseman K'Andre Miller from the New York Rangers.

"Our team approach is to be aggressive and to not worry about failure," Tulsky said. "And part of being aggressive is taking some risks. Some of them won't work and you just have to expect that if you're doing it the right way, enough of them will work that you'll end up ahead. So we're always trying to find ways to keep pushing and staying aggressive and keep making the team better."

That's seen, and appreciated, by the players.

"I think as a player on the team you're excited that your team is not going to sit and just be OK with what you have," forward Jordan Martinook said. "You're always looking to get better, and I think as a player on the team, when your team is trying to get better all the time, it's something that you can get behind.

"We took a run at Mikko, it didn't work out, but look what we got from it, 'Stanks' and 'Key,' those are two of the pieces that we got from that. 'Hallsy' was a part of that too. It's those three incredibly important pieces to our team and it just shows that they're ready to take a chance all the time."

It has always, at its base, been about solving puzzles for Tulsky. That's what drove his work throughout his career, whether that was in chemistry or solar panels or DNA sequencing or car batteries. For a person who obtained an undergraduate degree in chemistry and physics at Harvard, who got his doctorate in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, before becoming a post-doctoral associate at the Naval Research Laboratory, working out those problems always has drawn him in.

It has been the same in hockey, a riddle to work out. And now, having built a team that won a Stanley Cup, he has solved it once. Next season the puzzle shifts, and Tulsky will go about solving it again, in the way that best seems to fit him, and the Hurricanes, and the way he looks at how to run a front office.

"He's a very collaborative, inclusive person," Dellow said. "We have people on our staff who probably have never opened Excel on their computers, let alone built models and whatnot, and he is taking their information and he's probing them and trying to make them better by asking questions that might come from what he does. And he's trying to incorporate all the information he gets. Like, a lot of people pay lip service to it, but Eric's really doing it."

And now he has won the Stanley Cup.

He left behind the world of chemistry, of car batteries, of Apple, embracing hockey, taking a chance on himself.

"You probably hope that this day would come," Orach said. "But I don't think that's why you take the job. I don't think that was the expectation. I don't think it was Stanley Cup or bust.

"I think, very truthfully, it was sort of a, hey man, if you sign a three-year contract and go there for three years and do some cool stuff and it doesn't work out and you end up back here, you haven't really lost anything, and I think it's a hell of a story and it's a shot worth taking."

And what if? What if it all works out?

"Just happy for Eric and proud and thinking about all the people who called these guys nerds and said that they wouldn't be able to do it, you couldn't do it without a real hockey man in the room, and these guys went out there just went 16-3 in the playoffs," Orach said. "That's wild.

"I don't know what more you could say about them. I think they made a pretty big statement last night, right?"