Eight Years of Jordan Martinook

In May 2018, Carolina sent Marcus Kruger and a fourth-round pick to Arizona for a 25-year-old winger with 26 career goals. I remember reading about it and thinking, sure, fine, we needed forwards. That was the extent of my reaction. Depth guy. Penalty kill.

Eight seasons later he’s got his name on the Cup and that trade looks a lot better than it did at the time.

Game 2 in Ottawa

If you watched one Martinook shift this spring, it was probably this one.

First overtime, he draws a penalty shot. Ullmark stops him. That’s normally the end of it. You get your one crack at being the hero, you don’t convert, and it becomes a thing people bring up at bars for the next decade.

Then he scored the double-overtime winner. Snapped one from the slot with six minutes left in the second OT.

Carolina swept Ottawa, swept Philadelphia, beat Montreal in five, and got to the Final having lost one game. You don’t win a Cup on one goal in the first round. But that game could have gone the other way, and the guy who made sure it didn’t was the guy who’d just been stopped cold an hour before.

The numbers

Twelve goals, 17 assists, 77 games last year. Just under 15 minutes a night. A 58.7 CF% while starting fewer than half his shifts in the offensive zone, which is the analytics way of saying the puck went the right direction when he was out there. Career totals: 797 games, 262 points.

Nobody’s putting that on a banner. He was a second-rounder in 2012 and the honest scouting take was that he might play in the league.

But the numbers miss the point with a guy like this. Carolina has been the same team for eight years — forecheck, suppress shots, bore you to death and then punch you. That’s Rod Brind’Amour’s system. Martinook is what it looks like when someone actually executes it every single night, including the January road games nobody watches.

You can’t fake that for eight years. I’ve tried to fake enthusiasm for far shorter stretches.

Why he’s stuck
There’s a version of this player who gets a nice tribute video and is forgotten by the following Christmas.

He isn’t that, and I think it’s because he never stopped acting like he was thrilled to be here. Storm Surge, Bunch of Jerks, the long stretch where we were good enough to be annoying and not good enough to matter, and then this year. He was around for all of it and treated all of it like a guy who couldn’t believe they let him in the building.

The draft night thing in June is a good example. He’d gotten a “Conn Staal” shirt to honor Staal’s Conn Smythe, planned to announce Carolina’s first-round pick in it, and then the team traded the pick to Nashville without telling him. So he sat there waiting. When the call never came he filmed himself and his son Chase announcing the 51st overall pick — William Hakansson, a defenseman out of Sweden — and welcomed the kid to Raleigh himself.

That’s not a guy doing a bit. That’s just how he is, and after eight years you can tell the difference.

The awkward part
He turned 34 on July 25. He’s going into the last year of the three-year deal he signed in 2024, and he’ll be an unrestricted free agent after this season.

The math on 34-year-old bottom-six wingers is not sentimental, and Eric Tulsky isn’t a sentimental GM. There are young forwards coming. The cap’s going up but so is everyone’s raise.

So this isn’t really a hockey argument. He showed up as a throw-in, spent eight years doing the unglamorous work through a long run of good teams that kept coming up short, and then got his name on the Cup at 33. He should finish here. Watching him sign a one-year deal somewhere out west at 35 to be a veteran presence for a team that has no idea what he means would be a bad way for this to end.

What sticks

Not the point totals. Nobody’s memorizing 12 and 17.

It’s the penalty shot and then the goal. The hits. The blocked shots. The fact that things always seemed to loosen up a little when he got going.

And it’s June 14 in Las Vegas — Bussi’s 22-save shutout, Taylor Hall opening it, Ehlers putting it away, 20 years of waiting finally over — with a guy on the ice who’d been here for eight of them.

Good for him.