Brind'Amour takes Paul Maurice's last Carolina record

Paul Maurice beat Rod Brind'Amour in two conference finals. Now Brind'Amour has taken the one thing Maurice still held over him in Carolina, and he needed nine seasons to do what took Maurice parts of 13.

Saturday's 3-2 win in Winnipeg was Brind'Amour's 385th regular-season win as the franchise's coach, by our count from its coaching records. Maurice won 384 across his two stints: 61 in Hartford and 323 in Raleigh. The Panthers' coach is now second on his old team's list.

The record is nice. The pace is the story.

How he got there

Brind'Amour won 378 games in his first eight seasons, and four of those seasons topped 50 wins. Saturday was his 625th regular-season game behind the bench.

The road went through Sunrise. Florida knocked Carolina out of the conference final in 2023 and again in 2025. After the second one, Maurice skipped the handshake line, and Brind'Amour answered that "it is about the players." Then he went out and won the Cup last June against Vegas. That's one way to settle a debate.

The streak is the real number

Carolina has won seven straight, and the special teams are why. The Hurricanes are killing 93.5 percent of their penalties and scoring on 27.0 percent of their power plays, per NHL data. They're 5-0 on the road and plus-14 over their last five games, by our count. Nine games is a small sample. It's also a scary one.

Saturday showed both sides of it. Carolina gave the puck away twice in its own end in the second period and trailed twice.

Mark Jankowski scored on the power play, Jesperi Kotkaniemi tipped a Shayne Gostisbehere shot to tie it, and Nikolaj Ehlers won it with a power-play slap shot early in the third. Pyotr Kochetkov stopped 22 of 24 for his fifth straight win.

"I thought we were pretty sluggish to start the game and made some uncharacteristic mistakes," Brind'Amour said.

That's a coach who just set a franchise record and spent the postgame on turnovers. It tells you why the record fell.

The Ferda take

For Panthers fans, the number to steal is the kill. Florida's penalty kill sits at 80.6 percent, per NHL data. Carolina's is nearly 13 points better, which means the champs can take a penalty and barely notice.

Maurice won't lose sleep over a franchise record from a job he left in 2011. He might over this: the team he's beaten twice in the conference final is the reigning champion, and it hasn't slowed down since June.

What's next

Carolina plays in Calgary tonight at 8 p.m. ET. Our call: the streak reaches eight, and the penalty kill stays above 90 percent through October.