Remembering the Night Max Domi Was the Best Player on the Ice

Some Hurricanes are here for years. Max Domi was really here for one night. But what a night it was.

Go back to the 2022 trade deadline. Carolina needed scoring and was tight against the cap, which meant the expectation was they couldn't do much. Instead they pulled off a complicated three-way trade with Columbus and Florida and brought in Max Domi. It was a classic low-risk flier. Domi hadn't done much in Columbus, but the talent was real. He was only three years removed from a 72-point season in Montreal. If it hit, great. If it didn't, no harm done.

For a while, it didn't hit.

Domi was quiet down the stretch. Two goals, seven points in 19 regular season games, mostly in a bottom-six role. Then the playoffs started against Boston, and it was more of the same. Six games in, he had two assists and not much else. The kind of deadline pickup you forget you even made.

Then came Game 7.

With the Canes stuck in a sluggish Game 6, Rod Brind'Amour shuffled his lines and bumped Domi up alongside Vincent Trocheck and Teuvo Teravainen. He kept the trio together for the win-or-go-home finale. And Max Domi picked that exact moment, the biggest game of the entire season, to deliver the performance of a lifetime.

In a 3-2 win over the Bruins on home ice to take the series, Domi factored in on all three Carolina goals. He scored two of them himself and dropped a slick feed to Teravainen for the prim