Allow me to take you back in time to a time when there were only 30 teams in the NHL. Only the Dallas Stars had won a cup since 1994 that didn’t belong to the Colorado Avalanche, New Jersey Devils, or Detroit Red Wings. Carolina had just made the Stanley Cup Finals only 5 years after being relocated from Hartford, Connecticut.
Carolina had one major hole they needed to fill, and it was in the blue paint. You can apply this sentence to seemingly every season ever for the Carolina Hurricanes/Hartford Whalers franchise. So Carolina looked towards a goaltender from the draft when they took a young man from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan named Cam Ward.