Carolina Hurricanes owner and legend, both in studio!

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Eastwood Homes is Built With Care. Stanley Cup playoffs in full swing. And in studio, two legends of the pickleball circuit.

The owner of the Carolina Hurricanes, Tom Dundon, and Justin Williams, a Hurricanes Hall of Famer. This is very good. You guys look right off the pickleball court. It's very nice. Thank you very much for coming in. I appreciate what you guys are doing. Alright, are we all sitting there?

I think we're all sitting there. Did you play pickleball today? We did.

How'd you do? Did you win? Come on. Justin played with you, so the answer is yes?

Of course. A lot of people don't know this, but Tom, just because he owns the pickleball circuit, he's a very, very good pickleball player. He played tennis. Very, very good pickleball player.

You were a tennis player in college. No. Tom's pretty good.

No. He's good with a racket, for sure. He's good with a paddle. So, I know Rod Brindamore played in the pro end that you guys had a couple of weeks ago when I was in Phoenix for the Final Four. Humble brag. A little humble brag there.

I was gone because I couldn't make it because I was here. Exactly. But Rod said that Justin, you're like half a pro already at pickleball.

I'm not, but I have a good time with it, for sure. And when Tom comes into town, will you either play some golf or play some pickle and wait for the Canes games at night? Is he better at pickleball or golf? Pickle. Really? I'm terrible.

No, no, no. Is he better at pickleball or golf? He's good at both. I know he's good at both. He just played in the celebrity invitational golf tournament. Talking about humble brag, he's like, Justin, let's talk Canes. And he sends me a little tweet, a text about, yeah, I'm playing the celebrity invitational golf tournament. Which Eric Cole was out there, just hung out with you for a day?

He came and played the pro end and there was a little pickleball exhibition, too, that they had there also. Do you have your own racket? No. A paddle? Is it a racket or a paddle? I can sign a racket and call it my own. That's fine. All right, let's talk a little hockey. Let me start with the owner here. Business good?

Yeah. It's been pretty good. It's a good year.

It has been a good year. How have you dealt with the fact that at the beginning of the season, the team was the favorite, and then as we got back to the playoffs, again, the team is the favorite? Does that make you more nervous? Can you even possibly be more nervous than you normally are before any game? I don't know. I hadn't thought about it like that. It's probably about the same. There's always a chance you could lose and that chance is what makes you nervous.

You know this as well or better than anybody, Justin. It doesn't make a difference how good you are. The first round of the NHL playoffs, Rod said to me the other day that it's the toughest round to win. What do you think about just round one?

How do you approach it? Because it really doesn't matter. You could lose.

I don't know if I disagree or agree with that. People expect the first round to be hard. It's not that it makes any round less hard. Everybody's usually pretty healthy. But to go back to what Tom was saying, are you nervous that you may lose? Yeah, you might lose, but a lot of luck goes into it as well. And the luck part, being healthy. You can see last year we weren't very healthy. Obviously we had Jesper Faust out, but that's one guy on our team. And with the depth we have, we're able to overcome that. But being healthy going to the playoffs is such a big tool to have and such a big benefit for us having our full complement of players. Is that luck?

A little bit, yes. It comes down to it, absolutely. Obviously taking care of yourself and stretching and doing preventative stuff is very important. But there's the freak accidents that happen. It's hockey. It's a fast sport. Everybody knows that.

And you can get hurt when it's not really your fault. I'm happy with the way we're coming in. I'm happy we won the first game, but I know we have a long way to go. Oh my gosh, one of 16 wins that you're trying to get.

And they're all difficult. Tom, have you suggested to Rod who he should start in goal tonight? No, he doesn't take suggestions.

There's no suggestion box down there. Oh, there should be. So who do you expect to be in goal tonight? I assume it'll be Freddie. I didn't even ask. Do you know?

I didn't ask. I assume it's going to be Freddie. They're all good. Right.

So I do too. And like I talked to him at five o'clock tonight and the first question I'm going to ask, who is it? I'm not going to say if he says Piotr, I'm not going to say, are you nuts? Because we know Kuchetkov has been so good since December 12th. I mean, the numbers, that's a that's a pretty big sample size since December 12th. He's a top five goalie in the league since then. All all of the metrics say that whether he is or not in everybody's mind, all the metrics say he's top five goal in the league since then. I won't say that, but I think it's Freddie based on the ways he's played. That's just the way I look at it.

You have a comment about that? No, I mean, they've all played very, very well for us. Certainly this, you know, the last three quarters of the season, they played extremely well for us, given us a chance to win.

And we're certainly not at a disadvantage to any team when you start a playoff series. What do you think of the save on Noah Dobson in the third period, Tom? Pretty fortunate. Look, we talk about luck. You wear hats a lot with a shamrock on it. Not on purpose.

No, I've seen that, right? I'm sure it's a logo for something, but there is an element of luck in that save. Noah Dobson is an elite defensive, offensive player at, I think, 60 points in 70 games this year. And he's got a lot of net. And Freddie kind of paying homage to Kajetkov, I don't need a stick. I mean, you make, I'm a firm believer in you making your own luck.

I really am. Sometimes people call it luck when the puck just seems to find you, but I call it an innate ability to just be in the right spot, read the play, kind of see where the puck's going before others do. Obviously, Freddie, that was just an acrobatic save.

I'm thinking he's going to shoot high. I'm going to do everything I can to keep this puck out of the net. And he did it, and it was a big moment and a big game changer, and we're going to need plenty more of those to be successful and win 15 more. The two shifts after that created the Nason goal, right? The Koch and Emmys line comes on the ice after that. They might have been on the ice for that shift, for all I know, but the next part of the next minute was spent in the New York end. And then Kuznetsov's line comes on the ice, and they spent all that time in that end of the ice, and it created the Nason goal. It's funny, I don't think I'll be wrong or will be wrong about the goalie tonight, but man, and I'm going to direct this to you, Tom, I've been wrong about two major things this year about this team. In the offseason, I'm like, come on, they're not going under free agency.

That's not what they do. And then Michael Bunting, then Dmitry Orlov. And then at the trade deadline, when all the stuff about Jake Ansell's hitting, I'm like, people, the Hurricanes don't do rental players. Like, what are we doing?

0 for 2. So I could be wrong. I could be wrong tonight. Walk me through the philosophy about why you thought this was the year to, A, delve into free agency, and because there's no guarantees that Jake will be here next year, and to do something like that at the deadline. Free agency, as long as we can get shorter term contracts, we're always in the middle of it. It's just if someone gives a contract that buys years that won't help us, give us enough value, then that's why we don't do it. It's not that we're anti-free agency. It's just sometimes at the age that players hit free agency, and the amount of term they get, it's hard to make that work with a salary cap.

And then on the trade deadline, I mean, we were fortunate that we had an extra pick. I believe you've got to keep your picks, and that's how you find some of the guys we find. And usually when there's rental players, they're not like this guy.

He's just a little better than most of them. So a lot of times you're paying a similar price. We'd rather pay more and get the best than get something pretty good and pay a lot. So I'll pay more than a lot to get the best.

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Investment advisory services offered by Capital Financial Advisory Group, a North Carolina registered investment advisor. I don't think Don's talked to them just because it was all so rushed. Kind of a difficult time of year to do it. Yeah, and we have so many free agents.

It's just time to, there'll be time to do that later. There's a lot of free agents. You guys are going to have a very busy, and not a lot of time to do it, based on hopefully playing all the way until the end of June. I think one of the best things for free agents is to just present them what we are, right?

And time, really, the better we play, the further we play, the more players get to know the area, get to know the players on the team, get to know the coach, the management, everybody in the Hurricanes family. That will give them a better opportunity and give us a better opportunity to re-sign them if potentially there's something to fit. So, when you say you don't want to rush into it, you want to give them a good opportunity to see what we have to offer, too, and I think it's pretty darn high.

Justin Williams and Tom Dundon are in studio. I probably should have asked this before we started, but give me a time frame for how long you guys want to be here before you want to fly out of here. Because I can take a break now, come back and talk to you for another 15 minutes, or I can go a little longer now and then let you go.

So you tell me what you want to do. I'm fine, it's up to you. Let's go a little longer now, because I'm getting kind of hungry, it's past my lunch time. Oh, past your lunch time, right after the pickleball.

Yeah, it's running a little longer. Alright, well, that's fine. Sorry to hear your responses. See, he overruled you. He did. Everybody does. Nobody realizes that that's actually what happens. Alright. This is a bigger NHL picture real quick.

I want to get to this. So we already had an instance with hurricanes in Boston a couple of weeks ago, where a goal was disallowed because it wasn't completely across the line. My understanding was the NHL didn't provide a clear enough picture to either bench that said, no goal. Goal was given on the ice, no goal. Last night in Colorado, Winnipeg, there was, I mean, gong show of a game, but there was a similar situation where they said no goal on the ice and then overturned it pretty quickly. And I was watching the game on ESPN, they did not provide anything that was clear. What kind of responsibility does the league have in real time to show both benches, here's why, and provide that also to all broadcasts, because now in the first round of the playoffs, you've got not only the national, but both local broadcasts. If we can get tennis at 135 mile an hour served to determine the ball hit the back of the line in real time with a computer, and everybody knows yes or no, why can't we do that in hockey?

I'll start with you. I think it's coming. I think there's things that are being tested and processes. We have a feed, so our guys have the same feed they have in Toronto, so I don't think it's that big of an issue for the team, but when it comes to the broadcast and the fans, I agree that we can improve it.

And then if you put in the right technology, then it'll just make it that much finer of getting it right. I remember watching that, too, and no one really seemed to complain. It was a really quick turnaround. Puck went in, off we go, and there was nothing on TV. With the overhead that they have, I don't know if they showed it, but it clearly is. Yeah, I saw it after, but during it, I was like, whoa, don't they want to look at this again?

So quick. Well, obviously when it's that quick, you came, it's a goal, and I saw Bednar not really argue, and everyone assumes that they get it right. But they didn't put it on TV? They didn't show that overhead view? No, they showed the overhead view, but they didn't zoom in and show definitively, because at that point, the puck was almost at its end. And I didn't see a non-fuzzy picture of the Natius goal that was overturned in Boston.

I think it probably was the right call, but I agree with you between the fact that the paint isn't perfectly cut and the camera quality is not probably where it'll be in the future. Even though I don't think it was a goal, it'd be nice to have it more definitive, and I think you will in time. So why can't we, like, I'm also a big soccer watcher, and VAR, even if the angle is not perfect, they can draw lines.

They call it drawing lines, and basically it's a laser line. Why can't we have a laser line right along the back of the goal line that definitively tells us, all right, the puck is in, the puck is not? That just seems logical to me. I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to say. I think it's just a matter of time. I think sometime in the future, you're probably right, that happens.

I try not to be unreasonable. You're ahead of your time. How many people told you that? Nobody.

You would be the first. Sebastian Ajo, you got here, and you knew he was going to be the face. You played with him, Justin. How much better is he today than he was five years ago? Well, I didn't know that first year. When I was watching— You told me you did. No, when I was watching his first year before I bought the team, I wasn't sure if he was just a really good player on a bad team.

And that's scary, right? Like, he's getting all this because he's getting every opportunity, but if he had better players around him, he wouldn't get those opportunities. So he's definitely better than I initially thought. Now, after the first year, that second year, the first year when they made the playoffs, then you knew. But yeah, that first year when you're playing on a bad team and you're a really good player, it's hard to know if you're just getting that opportunity because there's nobody better. And somebody's got to score goals.

Someone does. All the teams score two and a half goals a game. Right. So, I mean, Sebastian has been such an awesome— It's been really cool to watch his development come from just coming in, being a player, and just slowly, gradually taking the steps that he's taken, not only on the ice. He's such a leader in the dressing room, too, and the way he plays, his demand to be better. And when you see that from your best players, I mean, your best players have to be your best workers. And we have that, right?

And that's how you develop the culture, blah, blah, blah. You hear Roddy talk about it all the time, right? So watching him play in practice and watching him play during the game, watching how much he cares, watching how much he has taken on a leadership role on this team, really has been special to watch his development from a young player to a young star in this league. And, you know, eventually, I'm sure, one day a captain. Yeah, if the other captain just doesn't stop playing. Jordan's still—I mean, he's not playing as much time as he was two years ago. But when he's on his game, I wouldn't want to—you've played against him. Would you want to play against him? People still—I mean, listen, we try to match lines, and they try to get away from it. So if they enjoyed playing against Jordan, they would say, you want Jordan against him?

Fine. Then just leave him out there. But teams try to get away from that, and that's just a tribute to how he is.

And I just saw him this morning, and he looks as trim as ever and ready to go. Here's the thing. Your one year as captain took a lot of pressure, I thought, off Jordan.

I think he is a better captain now than he—because he was the captain before, the year before. It was kind of weird. We had two, for whatever reason. Just very strange here. But I thought Jordan— And neither was him. Well, you and Justin and I had a conversation about that.

The whole thing was weird. But I think he is more comfortable with who he is as a player and a person. And to me, it's hard to be the captain and an effective one unless you are. And I just think his leadership is just awesome. I agree. I think it's hard because there's a difference between the most talented or the best player and the most important player.

And sometimes, obviously, we're lucky to have both, I think. Let me dig in. It's been a couple more minutes. We'll dig in on this series. I'll go to you, Justin, for the hockey part of this. The Islanders are going to play a certain way. I don't know if they actually played that way on Saturday night. I think Carolina might have been leaving a little bit more physical than New York. How do you prepare for what the Islanders probably need to bring to get back in the series?

Or not to get back. It's only 1-0. Yeah, I think they played well. I think what teams look at is obviously we had a very good season in terms of special teams. So if they want to run around and do things and try to get us off our game physically or mentally and end up in the penalty box, it's probably not great for them. Our power play has looked really good. It's done it all year. Our penalty has done really well all year or two.

Obviously, they're looking for holes and looking for things that they can fix. But they're going to play hard. They're going to play extremely hard. It's the playoffs. These are great players on that team as well. I think they give up a little bit more than what they used to give up.

But they have talented players who can put the puck in the net as well. This is going to be a long series. You've got to go into everyone expecting seven. I know in our dressing room we expect that.

They're ready for it if they have to go. Tom, would you take 28 playoff games? Sure.

That's the max. Yeah, that'd be good. I'd prefer it not like that. I'd prefer it winning quicker. So you'd like 16?

Yeah, for sure. Fewer home games, though. That's less money.

That's stress. I think it gets confusing because we run the business the right way. But the winning is not in the same category as the money.

The money is not a thing. How do you separate? How does Tom Dundon separate the business of the Carolina Hurricanes and the play of the Carolina Hurricanes? As the flowers bloom this season, so can your dream home. Start living your best life with our Move-In Ready Homes available today. Our Built With Care homes give you quality craftsmanship that will exceed your expectations.

Picture this. Open floor plans perfect for family gatherings with private backyards for grilling and entertaining this summer. Tour one of our 11-plus communities located in the Greensboro area today. Visit EastwoodHomes.com. That's EastwoodHomes.com.

Eastwood Homes is built with care. To me, the business, there's a right and a wrong way to do things. You want to operate.

You want to optimize. You want to give a good experience and you have a price for that and you create value. I look at what experience we create for our fans relative to the rest of the league and other sports. You just want to be the best you can be at that. On the winning side, if we think a player can help, it's just about the cap.

It's not about the money. Right. Well, you guys have proven. You've been up against the cap in the last four years. The last time you weren't, you bought Patrick Marlow, which leads me to Seth. Pretty good, huh?

My gosh. I'll ask you about Seth in a second, Justin, before we let you go. Does a long-term deal for Seth have to happen this offseason?

He wants it to. We always want to do long-term deals with young players, so we're always trying to do that. If that's more, can you find the right mix of leaving yourself to flex, making sure the players are compensated for how good they are and what they bring to the team, but leaving enough for the other people because everybody wants to win, right? Right.

The better you are, the harder it is. To me, we knew Seth was a better player last year with less production and more games. He had fewer points in more games last year than the year before, but if you watch every game, you can see he was getting better, and he was a better overall player. How do you look at Seth Jarvis year three? I mean, development's been great. You draft these kids in the first round, and you expect them to be great right away, right?

I think that's obviously the wrong way to do it, right? Everybody's going to develop at their own time. Everybody's going to be impactful potentially at a different time.

Some people have ceilings, and some don't. Obviously, Seth is getting opportunities to do a lot more different things, play on the first unit power play, play out there with Jordan Stahl on the first unit PK. He's playing a lot, but he's earned that, right? He's absolutely earned that. He's first in every corner. He comes out with a lot of pucks, and he's creating a lot of offense for his line mates, and people love playing with him, and I can see why.

His personality. Doesn't that help both ends? It helps the play, and doesn't it help the business for Seth?

I'm sure it does. I don't know how to quantify that, but more than anything, it helps you be proud and feel good about your team when you get to know these people, and you realize they're good people, and they're fun, and the other guys are together. I don't know how many more fans buy tickets, but I know I appreciate that. You track jersey sales? There's got to be a lot of 24 jersey sales going off the shelves.

I think we've talked about this, and this sounds... There's not enough merchandise you can sell to put a dent in the kind of money that you have to spend on players and all that, but yes. For me, it's not the money on the jersey sales. It's much more about the people who are in that jersey. They're proud of their team. They identify with the player. They care.

Regardless of the economics of that, that's an indication of just what kind of an impact he's got. I've probably kept you longer than Justin wanted, because Justin's hungry. Starving here. If I had known, we would have had something brought in. The development. How close are you, Tom, to getting, not shovels in the ground, but when do you plan to start? What's the first phase?

Is there any light you can shed on the area around the arena? I think we're moving to final documents now. It's just however long that takes, but it's pretty close.

It's been worked on for months, so it's all the little stuff now. I think it's close. I'm rooting for 28 games, because it's fun.

And whatever. 16 will be good, too. I'm not going to knock 16. I won't get a longer offseason.

It'll be the same, because the Stanley Cup final is going to be played in a couple days. Rod doesn't like rest. He hates it. Alright, Justin Williams, Tom Dundon. I appreciate both of you guys coming in. Huge surprise.

Nice to see both of you. And you smell fine. I do? Yeah.

Didn't work hard enough. Thank you. There you go. On the pickleball court. Tom Dundon, Justin Williams. Maybe I'll see you guys at the arena coming up tonight. We'll be right back.