Finally, We Have a Guy

For years I watched this team play the exact same honest, structured, skilled hockey and win a ton of regular season games, and every spring I had the same nagging thought. We don't have a guy. You know the guy I mean. The one who makes the other team think twice. The one who answers when somebody runs Aho or takes a run at Stanky. Carolina had everything except an answer to that, and in the playoffs, when it gets mean, you feel the absence of it.

Then at the deadline they went and got Nicolas Deslauriers, and it was honestly the only move they made. A conditional seventh-round pick for a 35-year-old bruiser. Nothing splashy. And it turned out to be exactly what the room needed.

He gets to Carolina and in his debut, before the game is even half over, he skates over to Mathieu Olivier in warmups, says a few words, and then drops him in the second period. That was his 137th career fight, if you're keeping track. The building woke up. And here's the part I love: Svechnikov scored our goal before Deslauriers was even out of the penalty box. That is the whole point of having a guy. He didn't put up numbers. He changed the temperature of the game.

That's the thing people who roll their eyes at fighting miss. I'm not saying you win with an enforcer. You don't. You win with Aho and Slavin and Andersen and depth and structure, and we have all of that. But there's a difference between a team that can be pushed around and a team that can't, and it shows up in exactly the games that matter most. For a long time we were the first kind. Now we're not.

And the best part is he's not going anywhere. He won the Cup with us, then got up on stage at the parade next to Tulsky and signed two more years right there in front of everybody. Two more years. That tells you what the team thinks of what he brings, and it tells you he wanted to be here.

Look at what's coming too. Florida just stacked another Tkachuk. The East is getting meaner, not nicer. The nights are going to get heavy again in the spring, and this time we've got somebody who's happy to make it heavy right back.

For years I wanted this team to add one thing. They finally did. And they won a Cup the same season.

We have a guy now. About time.

Go Canes.