Every team in the league gets the same seven rounds. Same pool of kids, same scouts sitting in the same rinks in Sweden and Saskatchewan watching the same games.

Carolina's two best homegrown players came off the board at 35 and 120.

That's the whole story of how this roster got built, and it's a lot less romantic than people make it sound.

Slavin

Fourth round, 2012. Pick 120.

A hundred nineteen players went ahead of Jaccob Slavin. I'd bet money you can't name twenty of them.

He's now finished in the top 20 in Norris voting every single season since his second year in the league. Two Lady Byng trophies. He takes the other team's best line every night, he does it without taking penalties, and he plays about 21 minutes doing it.

He makes $6.396 million on an eight-year deal that runs through 2033. For a defenseman of that caliber, in this market, that number is close to comical.

Fourth round.

Aho

Second round, 2015. Pick 35.

Thirty-four teams looked at a Finnish center out of Kärpät and decided they had better options. Some of them had two picks in that range.

He's the highest-paid Hurricane at $9.75 million. He put up 80 points last season. He's the franchise leader in playoff points, game-winning goals, short-handed goals, and overtime winners, and if he stays healthy for six more years he'll pass Ron Francis at the top of the scoring list.

Ron Francis is also the guy who drafted him.

The rest of it

Jackson Blake went 109th in 2021. He's on the second line.

Alexander Nikishin went 69th in 2020, third round, and he led the entire playoffs in offensive zone time percentage as a rookie.

Seth Jarvis went 13th, which is a real first-round pick but not a lottery pick, and he led the team with 32 goals.

Add it up and Carolina's homegrown core, the part that's actually theirs, drafted and developed in-house, mostly came from picks 13, 35, 69, 109, and 120.

Now the honest part

I've seen people frame this as "Carolina won a Cup without any high picks" and that's not true, so let me not do that.

Andrei Svechnikov went second overall in 2018. Carolina drafted him. He had 31 goals and 70 points last season and scored two power-play goals in Game 5 of the Final.

Jordan Staal went second overall in 2006, to Pittsburgh. Taylor Hall went first overall in 2010, to Edmonton. Both of them were on the ice in June.

So there were three top-two picks in that lineup. The roster is not some triumph of scouting over talent.

What's true is narrower and more interesting: Carolina didn't out-draft anybody at the top of the board. They out-drafted people after pick 30.

Why that matters more than it sounds

Here's the thing about high picks. Everybody gets them right eventually. If you're picking second overall you're choosing between two obvious players and it's hard to be catastrophically wrong.

The teams that separate themselves do it in the third and fourth rounds, where the difference between a scout who's right and a scout who's guessing is enormous, and where a hit means you get an NHL player at almost no cost against the cap.

Slavin at $6.4 million is the entire Carolina model in one contract. So is Aho at $9.75 million being the highest-paid guy on a Cup winner, in a summer where a 20-year-old signed for $18.8 million and a 21-year-old signed for $18.

You cannot buy that. You can only find it.

The uncomfortable footnote

Both of those picks happened under previous management. Slavin in 2012 was Jim Rutherford's front office. Aho in 2015 was Ron Francis.

Eric Tulsky inherited them. He's done well with what he inherited — the Necas trade chain that ended with Stankoven scoring in Game 4, the Bussi waiver claim, K'Andre Miller — but the two contracts that make the whole cap sheet work were signed on somebody else's scouting.

That's not a criticism. Most Cup teams are built by two or three regimes stacked on top of each other. It just means the answer to "how did Carolina do this" goes back further than most people want it to.

Fourteen years back, to a fourth-round pick out of Colorado that nobody noticed.