By Pat Welter

The Hurricanes have been so consistent the last six years it’s easy to take their success for granted. After falling in the second round of the playoffs to the New York Rangers, cracks started to appear in the foundation this off season. First there was the contract negotiation with Rod Brind’Amour. After some anonymous source reporting drama, Brind’Amour signed a multi-year extension.

“It’s hard for me to envision doing this anywhere else, that’s the bottom line,” Brind’Amour said after signing the contract in May. “What makes it important to me is the people I’m around because I know their commitment and I see it.”

Days after those comments, Hurricanes president and general manager Don Waddell, stepped down from his position after ten years with the team and took a job as Columbus Blue Jackets president of hockey operations. Losing the face of the front office responsible for six straight playoff appearances isn’t easy to overcome. Assistant GM Eric Tulsky was named interim GM and it didn’t take long for the team to officially promote the smartest guy in the room.

“This was never on my radar at all,” Tulsky said in an interview with WRAL during Hurricanes training camp. “It’s pretty wild that I’ve ended up here.”

Tulsky’s story reads like something out of a Michael Lewis sequel to “Moneyball.” Degrees in physics and chemistry from Harvard, a Ph.D. in chemistry from Cal, over a decade of experience in nanotechnology, 27 US patents.

“Of the patents themselves some of them were particularly creative and resourceful,” Tulsky answered about having a favorite patent. “My favorites are the ones most likely turning out to be useful instead of just creative. There are a couple that are behind some products that are on or are going to market soon.”

Nanotechnology isn’t the easiest science to understand without a Harvard degree, but put simply as you make things smaller their properties change.

“My first set of research avenues were in basically rocks that if you make them small enough they emit light,” Tulsky explained. “You can use that light emission for things like medical imaging or the “Q” in QLED TVs is for quantum dots. Those are the nano particles I was working on.”

So how does a guy responsible for making the technology inside your TV become the guy who built the team you’re watching on it? He wrote a blog and got noticed, A dream many sports fans can relate to.

“I was enjoying it, it was going well I built up a little bit of an audience and I started asking around about consulting projects,” Tulsky said. “I got a one off project here, a one off project there. And one of the times that I asked around the Hurricanes were interested in doing something more.”

Tulsky started working for the Canes part time as a consultant in 2014 and began working full-time as an analyst in 2015. He was named manager of hockey analytics in 2017, before being promoted to vice president of hockey management and strategy in 2018. According to the Hurricanes team site, since being named assistant general manager in 2020, Tulsky has been involved in all player personnel decisions, overseen pro scouting and the team’s hockey information department, and assisted with player contract negotiations, salary cap compliance, and other hockey-related matters.

“Basically taking the data that we have and trying to build up an understanding of what that allows us to predict,” Tulsky said. “There are going to be things that the data just can’t tell you, but any place that we can get data we want to know what it can tell us and how and what it says about the future.”

Like the “Moneyball” revolution in baseball, Tulsky has become one of the faces of analytics’ application to hockey.

“Baseball is a lot easier to analyze in a lot of ways because a lot of it comes down to one on one confrontations or a single person with a job to do,” Tulsky explained. “In hockey everything interacts and everything a player does is tied to what eight or nine other guys are doing on the ice. It’s just a harder problem to solve.”

Tulsky’s first task this off season as GM was the Canes long list of free agents. Tulsky was able to strike long term deals with cornerstone players like Seth Jarvis and Jaccob Slavin, but saw defenseman Brady Skjei and Brett Pesce leave for bigger deals elsewhere. Longtime forward Teuvo Teravainen signed a three year contract with Chicago, and deadline acquisition Jake Guentzel left in a trade to Tampa Bay.

“If we had tried to bring back our playoff roster and just match the contracts everybody got where they got them we would have needed about $108 million,” Tulsky said. “The salary cap is $88 million. We couldn’t bring everyone back, we were going to have to let a lot of players go. $20 million is a lot of money to shave off.  So you find yourself thinking we didn’t quit get there before, we can try to cling to as much of it as we can, but you know you’re not going to quite get there then.”

“So we had a little bit of a pivot and we’ve tried to bring in players who we think can help us keep taking steps forwards and tried to build things to open up space for some young players in our lineup to take on bigger roles,” Tulsky continued.

Sustained success has been a hallmark of Hurricanes hockey under owner Tom Dundon. They don’t mortgage the future for the present. It’s an approach that’s netted them three division titles and two eastern conference finals appearances. Tulsky is on board with the direction.

“We have a really strong core and we have a strong pool of prospects coming and I think this team is going to be there for a long time,” Tulsky said. “Last three years we’ve been 110 plus points three years in a row, of course we were good enough to win the [Stanley] Cup. It didn’t happen, we didn’t get it done, but we are right there. The team is good enough, we just need to get over that hump.”

Source: wralsportsfan.com