Hurricanes HC Rod Brind’Amour Talks Stanley Cup Title & More with Rich

Rod Brind'Amour has now won the Stanley Cup twice for the Carolina Hurricanes, once as captain in 2006 and once as head coach in 2026, and the conversation started with Rich cheerfully embarrassing himself, as he warned it would. Back when Rich covered Michigan hockey in the old CCHA, Brind'Amour's Michigan State team came into Yost Arena and pounded the Wolverines. Brind'Amour played only one year for Ron Mason in East Lansing before the NHL, but he remembered the barn fondly.

On being a champion again, Brind'Amour kept circling back to permanence. "It's for life now," he said of the title and the brotherhood that comes with it. You have to actually win it, because second place is no good, and he was proud of his guys for finishing the deal.

The difference between winning as a player and as a coach, he said, is real. As a player, he'd wanted the Cup since he laced up skates at five, and he wanted it for himself. As a coach, he already knows how great the feeling is and how it changes your life, so he wanted it for his players, watching through different eyes with a lot more gratitude. He compared it to watching your kids succeed.

Rich noted that every champion coach he knows is a control freak, and asked how Brind'Amour handles not being on the ice. As a player, Brind'Amour said, he came home stressing over his own mistakes. As a coach, he has 20 guys to worry about and little he can do once the puck drops beyond preparing them and turning them loose.

The boldest move was the goalie swap, replacing a hot Frederik Andersen with Brandon Bussi mid-run. Brind'Amour explained it was actually easy. Bussi had been the number one all year, and Andersen started on pedigree and ran the table before getting worn down and nicked up. He wasn't going to play a goalie at less than 100 percent at that stage, and a two-minute conversation with his goalie coach settled it. Bussi, despite the layoff, came in lights out and won three straight to clinch.

Rich ran through the eerie symmetry with 2006: Brind'Amour the captain then and coach now, current captain and Conn Smythe winner Jordan Staal the younger brother of his old teammate Eric Staal, and a rookie goalie both times. Brind'Amour thinks the hockey gods were winking, and gushed about Jordan Staal, the beast who takes the toughest matchups and finally got rewarded on the biggest stage.

He shared what he did with the Cup in 2006, taking it home as captain and setting it in his sleeping kids' bedroom so they'd wake up to it, then bringing it back to his hometown for a community celebration. Today's players, he laughed, do crazier things with it, already several days into hauling it around.

Brind'Amour now joins Toe Blake, Hap Day, and Cooney Weiland as the only men to win the Cup as a player and a coach for the same team, a list Rich pointed out probably never produced a shirtless celebration photo like Brind'Amour's. The coach blamed social media and a player who ripped his shirt off in the locker room. As for the famous physique, "Rod the Bod" insisted he's boring, with no real cheat days beyond eating whatever his four kids leave around, and a workout he gets to first thing every day, because if you don't, you never will.