About Last Season: Final Grades for the 2021-22 Carolina Hurricanes

We might just start renaming our annual year in review series the Jaccob Slavin Awards.

For the third year of the past four, the Carolina Hurricanes’ own version of the Rock of Gibraltar has topped the GPA calculations based on your votes. (Last year we didn’t post the final numbers because.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯? Probably had something to do with the number cruncher moving to a new state in the middle of the series. Just a hunch.)

What stood out to me in compiling the numbers this year was how solid they all were. Out of 25 polls, 19 of them resulted in a grade of an A or B of some flavor. Now, to be fair, I did curve the grades a bit this year (mostly because previously it was literally impossible to get an A+), but let’s be honest: this isn’t the Hurricanes of the mid-2010s we’re dealing with here, and thank God.

For a season that was almost universally regarded as a disappointment, the grades surprised me a bit. I have a feeling that if we had posted the polls a couple of days after the season ended, you’d have been much harsher on everyone except maybe Slavin and Seth Jarvis. Instead, waiting a few weeks seemed to cool the temperatures somewhat.

The criteria is the same as in past years: players who played at least 10 games with the Hurricanes and were still somewhere in the system at the end of the season got a full article and a grading poll. Let’s take a look at this year’s grades:

Some notes and thoughts on the grades:

• There were a whole lot of A’s this year, more than before. Of course, curving has a lot to do with that; all of those A-minuses would have been B-pluses in years gone by. But still, half of the polls resulted in a GPA of at least 3. I’d have killed for that in college.
• Only three players did not receive a single “F” vote, and oddly enough, not one of them remains with the team: Nino Niederreiter (RIP, fuel and fire), Vincent Trocheck, and Derek Stepan (?!).
• In terms of raw A votes, it wasn’t Slavin that led the line. Instead, resident wunderkind Seth Jarvis tallied nearly 400 A votes. (And two F’s. If you were one of them, quit trolling our polls.)
• There wasn’t a player who had an even bell curve. The closest was Jalen Chatfield, whose median vote was a B and had 46 above and 44 below. We didn’t really have anyone whose results were all over the board. In general, you were very consistent in your votes.
• The one exception was Jesperi Kotkaniemi, and I don’t blame our commenters for not knowing entirely how to evaluate him. He had almost twice as many B’s as F’s, but he had twice again as many D’s as B’s.
• Meanwhile, and this will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone, the poll with the most votes belonged to Tony DeAngelo, with almost 700. (It’s almost like controversial players draw traffic. Who’da thunk it?) The average, if you’re interested, was around 320 votes per player.
• Is the Rod Brind’Amour shine starting to wear off a bit? This is the first year since he took over that either he personally or the coaching staff in general racked up fewer A votes than B’s.
• The only player to not get a single A vote? You guessed it...Frank Stallo Martin Necas. Just like everyone would have guessed.

If you’re intrigued, here are the GPA cutoffs for each letter grade:

As always, thank you for participating in our grading this year, and we look forward to doing it again next season!