Chris LaFrance – USA Today Sports
Goalie Cam Ward burst on to the scene at age 22 during the 2006 Stanley Cup playoffs backstopping the Carolina Hurricanes to their first ever Stanley Cup championship. Ward made acrobatic saves look easy and won the Conn Smythe for playoff MVP as the Hurricanes beat the Edmonton Oilers in a thrilling seven-game series. Now almost a decade later the relationship between Ward and the Canes appears to have run its course.
To put it bluntly, the Hurricanes are an atrocious excuse for a hockey team as they have been mired in mediocrity essentially since that surprising Cup run and sit near the bottom of the league standings this year. Ward has been an at-best mediocre regular-season goalie posting pedestrian numbers annually and being part of what’s kept Carolina out of the playoffs for all but one season since 2006. While Ward may play like a below average netminder he sure isn’t paid like one, his $6.3 million cap hit is amongst the highest in the league. That albatross of a contract coupled with Ward’s play doesn’t make him the most attractive target for teams looking for help between the pipes. I really can’t see any team in the NHL making a trade for Ward, unless he goes on some amazing record-setting run, which is an almost laughable notion. As a result of these circumstances, it looks like Ward and the Hurricanes will be stuck together until his contract runs out after the 2015-16 season.
Carolina would ideally like to bottom out and draft one of the three super-phenoms in the 2015 NHL Entry Draft — Connor McDavid, Jack Eichel and Noah Hanifin to really get their rebuild going. While brighter days may be ahead fans in Carolina will need to weather the storm and deal with having such awful contracts on their equally inept team. Veterans like Ward, Jordan Staal and Alex Semin have completely laughable contracts that make them completely unattractive to potential suitors. The Hurricanes would essentially have to be content with settling for pennies on the dollar via trade just to move them off the books. Quite a fall for the goalie that was instrumental in delivering the team’s first and only Stanley Cup.
