RALEIGH, N.C. - Carolina’s annual State Fair road trip has become a useful measuring stick, and this one offered plenty to like for the defending champs.
With 15% of the 84-game regular season already behind them, the Hurricanes came back home with a strong enough sample to know where they stand. A month into the year, the picture is bright.
Carolina became the first team in the league to reach 20 points after its shutout win in St. Louis on Saturday, and the way it got there has stood out just as much as the results.
The biggest test on the trip came in the form of absences. Carolina was already without Jordan Staal, who has a calf tear, and Taylor Hall, who is dealing with an upper-body injury.
Then Mark Jankowski went down in the opening game of the trip, just after becoming the NHL’s hottest scorer with goals in six straight games. That left the Hurricanes missing a quarter of their forward group.
Rod Brind'Amour’s message was simple: nobody was going to take pity on them.
The response was depth. Jesperi Kotkaniemi was one of the players who helped carry the load.
Just 10 days ago, the 26-year-old was on the outside looking in, filling the extra role he had occupied for most of last season. Brind'Amour had said earlier this month that Kotkaniemi needed to sort out what his place on the team was going to be.
After sliding to wing for a stretch while Hall and Seth Jarvis were out, the injuries to Jankowski and Staal sent him back to his natural spot.
Kotkaniemi made the most of it. He put up four points in five games on the trip, including three goals, and handled important minutes on both special teams.
Others chipped in too. Nic Deslauriers’ two-goal game helped deliver the win in Vancouver, and Juuso Välimäki had two points in his first two games with the club. Carolina finished the trip 3-1-1, and the message from the trip was clear: the roster can still absorb hits and keep moving.
“With the guys out, we've had guys that came in to the lineup and have really stepped up,” Nikolaj Ehlers said. “We did that all last year, and it seems like it's started that way again this year.
I'm proud of the guys in here. It sucks that we have guys out, but we've got to play with the guys that we have, and these guys step up.
That's exciting for our team.”
The trip also brought back a familiar weapon. Seth Jarvis made his season debut Thursday in Edmonton and returned earlier than expected after offseason shoulder surgery. The timeline had been four to six months, but Carolina got its leading goal-scorer from the last two seasons back in the lineup and back making noise right away.
Jarvis said he felt rusty in his first 20 minutes, but that feeling didn’t last long. In the middle 20, he scored and looked like he had never left.
He spun Oilers defenseman Evan Bouchard, then finished the sequence by forcing Devon Levi to slide the wrong way across the crease for a highlight-reel goal. He added two assists Saturday, giving him three points in his first two games of the season.
“He's, in my opinion, become a super player. An elite player,” Brind'Amour said at Rogers Place. “He can do everything for your team.”
Between the skaters and the goalie, Carolina also got a huge lift from Pyotr Kochetkov. He has now won his first seven starts of the season, including all three on the trip, and he looks nothing like a goalie who played just nine games last season.
Kochetkov is tied for the league lead with seven wins, ranks third with a 1.70 goals-against average, and sits ninth with a .916 save percentage. He has allowed two goals or fewer in six of his seven starts. He also became just the second goalie in team history to begin a season with seven straight wins, and only the third active goalie to do it, joining Frederik Andersen, who opened 2021-22 with eight straight wins for Carolina, and Logan Thompson, who did it in 2024-25 with Washington.
“Excuse my language, but it was a s--- last year for him. We wanted to and were hoping for him to bounce back and feel good, and he's done that,” Ehlers said.
“We're happy with him. We're happy with Bussi, obviously.
We're very confident in our two goalies.”
There was more offense beyond Jarvis and Kotkaniemi, too. Logan Stankoven scored four times in the five games and is now tied for seventh among all NHL skaters with eight goals.
His four goals and six points on the trip matched Ehlers for the team lead. Ehlers had gone scoreless in the season’s first eight games, then broke out with three goals in his last three.
Jackson Blake reached 100 NHL points in 175 games, making him the fastest Hurricanes skater to hit that mark since Martin Necas did it in 158 games on Jan. 15, 2022. Deslauriers finished the trip with three points in four games after his multi-goal outing in Vancouver.
Carolina’s power play also did its part, clicking at 33.3% over the trip and pushing the season total to 12 man-advantage goals. Only Utah with 16, Toronto with 13 and Edmonton with 13 have more.
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