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16 years after being drafted first overall, Taylor Hall has finally reached the promised land
Photo credit: © James Guillory-Imagn Images
When the Edmonton Oilers chose Taylor Hall with their first-ever, first-overall NHL Draft selection in 2010, they did so largely because of the winger’s “proven greatness on the big stage.”
Earlier that spring, Hall had made Canadian Hockey League history by becoming the first player to win back-to-back Memorial Cup MVP awards. His combination of blazing speed and elite creativity made him an electrifying prospect. His play under pressure elevated him to the status of a saviour for a struggling franchise.
The Windsor Spitfires star was compared to future Hall of Famer Jarome Iginla because of his nose for the net and refusal to be stopped on the rush. Kevin Lowe, who was the president of the Oilers at the time, famously likened Hall to six-time Stanley Cup winner Mark Messier.
Now, 16 years after being drafted, Hall is finally getting the opportunity to showcase that big-game ability on hockey’s biggest stage with the Carolina Hurricanes, who are set to face the Vegas Golden Knights in the Stanley Cup Final.
The Canes have plowed through the Eastern Conference playoff bracket, eliminating the Ottawa Senators, Philadelphia Flyers, and Montreal Canadiens with a dominant 12-1 record. Hall is leading the charge offensively for Carolina, racking up 16 points across those 13 games.
“It’s so much fun. I feel like I deserve it. I really feel like our team deserves it. I feel like we’ve paid the price,” Hall said on Stanley Cup Final media day on Monday. “We’ve gotten better, and we’ve earned the right to be here. I couldn’t picture a better group to be here with.”
This Stanley Cup Final appearance has been a long time coming, not only for Hall, but for many of his teammates.
Carolina has only two Cup winners on their roster. Captain Jordan Staal won early in his career with the Pittsburgh Penguins, while winger William Carrier was on the Golden Knights when they captured their first championship in 2023. Head coach Rod Brind’Amour also captained the Hurricanes to their first and only Stanley Cup in 2006.
Though the Canes have been a consistent playoff contender for the better part of the last decade, the team has struggled to get over the hump. Carolina fell in the Eastern Conference Final in 2019, 2023, and 2025, finally reaching their second-ever Stanley Cup Final exactly two decades after their first.
Having a room full of veterans without a Stanley Cup ring is motivating the Hurricanes to get the job done before it’s too late.
“Obviously, we want to win it in general, for everyone,” said defender Shayne Gostisbehere, who turned 33 in April. “But especially Hallsy and the older guys like myself, it’s our first time here out of our whole careers. We just want to win it all.”
When Carolina originally acquired Hall in a three-team blockbuster in January of 2025, he was viewed as more of a throw-in than the missing piece of the team’s Stanley Cup puzzle. The winger was struggling through a trying season with the rebuilding Chicago Blackhawks, scoring just 24 points in 46 games before the trade.
The focal point of that deal between Carolina, Chicago, and the Colorado Avalanche was Mikko Rantanen, who arrived with the Hurricanes after the Hawks agreed to retain half of the Avalanche star’s cap hit.
Rantanen played only 13 games with Carolina before he was traded again. The big Finn told the Canes he wasn’t going to sign a contract extension with the club, and he was quickly flipped to the Dallas Stars for Logan Stankoven and a collection of draft picks.
After the Rantanen saga, re-signing Hall became a priority for the Hurricanes. He scored 18 points in 31 regular-season games and six points over 15 playoff games, then inked a heavily-discounted three-year extension worth $3,166,667 annually before the start of free agency.
Though he likely could have made more money in free agency, the decision for Hall to stay with Carolina was simple. The Canes needed veterans willing to buy into their culture and system, while Hall needed a legitimate chance to compete for a Stanley Cup after a decade and a half in the NHL with very little playoff success.
In Carolina, Hall can focus on contributing within a well-rounded team structure rather than trying to drag a flawed roster into contention.
“The way we play is conducive to how I play hockey and how I think about hockey,” Hall said. “Once I got the system down and the details of where I need to be, that allowed me to not have to think a lot out there.
“As you get older and you play this game a while, you have to figure out if you don’t have your A-game,” Hall noted earlier in the playoffs. “Do you have your B-minus game or something close to that? You find a way to contribute. That’s hockey.”
Hall has done far more than simply contribute to this run.
The Alberta-born, Ontario-raised forward was dominant in Carolina’s first-round series with Ottawa, scoring two goals and seven points over the four-game sweep. Hall added five more points in the four-game sweep over Philadelphia, highlighted by the overtime-winning goal in Game 2 and three assists in a clinching Game 4 victory.
The Flyers pulled ahead early in Game 2, but the Canes battled back with a third-period goal to force overtime. With just over one minute left in the first extra period, Hall grabbed a puck at Philly’s blueline, dragged it to the net, and buried his own rebound to complete the comeback.
Head coach Rod Brind’Amour praised the veteran for his efforts following the win, noting that the overtime-winner perfectly exemplified the kind of determined player Hall is.
“There’s a pro that just understands how to evaluate his game,” Brind’Amour said after Carolina’s Game 2 win over Philadelphia. “He knows, ‘Maybe this isn’t going good, I’ve got to do something else.’“One thing about Hallsy that we know is that he wants to make a difference. And that goal, to me, kind of sums it up for me. You could almost tell when he grabbed it, ‘I’m going to try and put this away.’ He’s got that flare to him, and obviously it worked tonight.”
Anybody who’s watched the Hurricanes this season can see that Hall is a rejuvenated player. Though it took the 34-year-old longer than expected to find his ideal spot, it’s better late than never.
The Canes went 53-22-7 this season, cruising to the top spot in the Metro Division. The team was dominant at both ends of the ice, finishing second in the NHL with 291 goals and fifth with 236 goals against.
Hall scored 18 goals and 48 points over 80 regular-season games, good for seventh in team scoring. The veteran has found chemistry playing with youngesters Jackson Blake and Logan Stankoven on Carolina’s second forward line.
That trio has taken pressure off Sebastian Aho, Andrei Svechnikov, and Seth Jarvis to drive the offence, helping create one of the deepest Hurricanes teams of the Brind’Amour era.
“They’ve given me a lot of energy,” Hall said of Stankoven and Blake. “They’re very unique players with their size and how they go to the hard areas of the ice. They seem young, but they’re very mature in the way that they play, and mature in a way that I wasn’t at that age.”
What makes this situation so special for a player like Hall is the long, winding road that preceded it.
After winning back-to-back Memorial Cups, Hall arrived in the NHL with an Edmonton team that went 25-45-12 in his rookie season. He scored 132 goals and 328 points over 381 games in six seasons with the Oilers, never coming close to competing for a playoff spot.
The Oilers drew the golden ticket at the 2015 NHL Draft Lottery, landing phenom Connor McDavid with the top selection. With a new franchise player in the mix, Hall’s status shifted from saviour and future captain to support piece and guide.
McDavid lived with Hall during his rookie campaign in 2015-16, but that was the only season the two first-overall picks would play together. Following an ugly 31-43-8 campaign, the Oilers dealt Hall to the New Jersey Devils for shutdown defender Adam Larsson, paying a high price to fill a significant hole on the roster.
The trade divided Oilers fans. Many were ready for Edmonton to move on from Hall because of the team’s stalled rebuild, while others wanted to see the “H” from “H.O.P.E.” get an extended look alongside McDavid.
The drama surrounding the Hall for Larsson swap quieted down during the 2016-17 season as the Oilers went 47-26-9 and clinched a playoff spot for the first time since 2005-06. Meanwhile, Hall scored 53 points over 72 games for a New Jersey team that went 28-40-14.
Edmonton took down the San Jose Sharks in the first round of the playoffs, then lost a heartbreaking seven-game set to the Anaheim Ducks in the second round. After the Oilers were eliminated, Hall admitted that he was jealous watching his former teammates find the success that he couldn’t.
“I wouldn’t say I wanted them to lose, but it was nice to finally see them maybe get eliminated,” Hall said about the Oilers back in 2017 after the team ended its decade-long playoff drought. “It’s a weird dynamic. You’re happy for your friends, that they’re doing well and they’re going to experience the playoffs, but you can’t help but be a bit jealous.”
After missing the playoffs in his first seven NHL seasons, Hall broke out in 2017-18 with a Hart Trophy-winning performance.
He led the Devils with 39 goals and 93 points, 41 more than New Jersey’s second-highest scorer. It was the exact sort of showing that Oilers fans dreamed about while watching Hall dominate the OHL before he was drafted.
The Devils snuck into the playoffs with a 44-29-9 record, then were brushed aside in five games in the first round by the Tampa Bay Lightning. Despite the anticlimactic finish, this looked like it could be the beginning of a contention window for New Jersey.
Unfortunately for Hall and the Devils, that season was a one-off.
Hall scored 37 points in only 33 games in 2018-19, and New Jersey fell back out of the playoffs. Struggling through another mediocre season in 2019-20, the Devils traded the soon-to-be free agent winger to the Arizona Coyotes, a middling squad looking to gain meaningful experience.
Hall’s first playoff series victory ironically came in Edmonton, though not in a way anybody could have anticipated.
The Coyotes took down the Nashville Predators in a five-game, play-in series without fans in the stands after a multi-month shutdown for the COVID-19 pandemic. Arizona then lost in the first round of the actual playoffs to Colorado in five games.
The following off-season, Hall inked a one-year, $8 million deal with the Buffalo Sabres, yet another struggling franchise. That fit only lasted a few months, as Hall was moved to the Boston Bruins as part of a pre-trade deadline fire sale.
For a time, it looked like Hall had finally found a long-term home with the Bruins, the team that reportedly considered trading up from second to first overall to select him at the 2010 NHL Draft. Rather than testing free agency again, Hall re-signed with Boston on a four-year deal worth $6 million annually.
Hall helped the Bruins to a couple of excellent seasons, going 51-26-5 in 2021-22 before winning the Presidents’ Trophy with a 65-12-5 record in 2022-23. Despite those strong regular-season results, Boston fell in the first round of the playoffs both years.
The Bruins moved Hall as a salary cap dump to the Blackhawks in the summer of 2023, and it looked as though the former top pick would ride out the rest of his NHL days as a mentor for high draft picks on terrible teams.
Instead, last year’s move to Carolina has been a renaissance for Hall’s career. Now on his seventh NHL club, the winger advanced past the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time this spring.
“It’s unreal. It’s everything I could ask for,” Hall said about Carolina’s playoff run back in May. “It’s a lot of fun to come to work right now. We work hard, but we do it with a smile on our face. It’s not like this everywhere.”
While the Hurricanes surely would have loved to keep Mikko Rantanen, his departure ultimately created an opportunity for Hall to become a much larger part of Carolina’s future.
Building a winner starts with a front office that can acquire the right players and continues with a coaching staff that can put those players in a position to succeed. But, ultimately, winning comes down to the players themselves buying into the full picture and getting the job done on the ice.
A significant part of what the Hurricanes are doing this spring comes down to the team’s desire to get the job done for those who have been around for years without a true opportunity. This is a group who enjoys playing together and who badly want to win together.
After 16 years spent mostly on teams that never came close, Hall has become a driving force behind the team that believed he could help push it over the top.
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