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# I Found a Hurricanes Article From January 2017 and It Wrecked Me a Little
- URL: https://www.keeganthecaniac.com/i-found-a-hurricanes-article-from-january-2017-and-it-wrecked-me-a-little/
- Published: 2026-07-30T10:44:02.000Z
- Updated: 2026-07-30T10:44:02.000Z
- Author: Keegan

Somebody linked an old Canes Country piece the other day and I've been thinking about it since. January 2, 2017\. The headline is basically that Cam Ward is keeping the Hurricanes in the playoff chase but he can't do it alone.

Go read the details and tell me it doesn't hit differently now.

Ward was 32, the tenth oldest starter in the league. He'd started 30 of 36 games, 83 percent of them, and ranked sixth in the entire NHL in time on ice. He was putting up a .917 over the calendar year, which was dead even with Henrik Lundqvist and right there with Braden Holtby, who had just won the Vezina. He'd been named one of the three stars ten times in thirteen wins.

Thirteen wins. Ten times a star.

That's a guy dragging a team up a hill by himself, and the piece basically says so.

Then there's Eddie Lack, who hadn't played in two months between performance, injury and illness, and the writer is genuinely working through whether they should send him to Charlotte for a conditioning stint or just call up Michael Leighton. And there's a line in there about Jorge Alves getting into a game as the backup, which the author calls a story for the ages that Canes fans should carry forever.

He was right about that. But think about what it actually means that it happened. The equipment manager dressed. That's how thin this was.

The whole article ends with this: Cam Ward is doing his part to keep the team in the hunt, but he's going to need some help, and soon.

Help was not coming soon. That team missed the playoffs. So did the next one. The building was averaging under 12,000 that year. Rod wouldn't take over the bench for another year and a half.

But here's the detail that got me, and it's a small one buried in the middle.

The piece mentions that Ward was the only multiple recipient of the team's Chop Wood, Carry Water award.

That's January of 2017\. In a lost season. In a half empty building. On a team going nowhere. They already had a culture award for the guy who did the unglamorous work, and their aging franchise goalie kept winning it.

The thing we all talk about now, the identity, the standard, whatever you want to call it, it wasn't invented when the team got good. It was already there when nobody was watching. They were handing out awards for doing the dirty work while losing.

And the other thing about that roster. The article describes a young team building its identity. That young team had Aho on it as a rookie. It had Turbo. It had Jordan Staal, who is still the captain, who just lifted the Cup nine years later.

They were all in that room, in that season, in front of eleven thousand people.

Nine years later a different goalie nobody expected anything from won us a championship. Bussi got claimed off waivers by a team that had already given up on him twice. Same as Ward being a rookie in 2006 that nobody outside of Raleigh knew.

Both of this franchise's Cups were won by a goalie who wasn't supposed to be the guy.

I don't know. Reading that piece felt like finding a letter you wrote to yourself before you knew how anything turned out. Everything the writer was worried about was real, and it all went exactly as badly as he feared, and it also all worked out eventually.

Ward needed help and it took nine years to get there.

It got there.

Go Canes.