There is something deeply correct about a man whose job description includes dropping gloves choosing to spend his day with the most famous trophy in sports at a beach bar on the Jersey Shore. Nicolas Deslauriers, traded from the Philadelphia Flyers to the Carolina Hurricanes at the March 6 deadline, brought the Stanley Cup to Seaport Pier in North Wildwood on July 17 — the town he calls home in the offseason and the town that returned the favor by declaring it Nicolas Deslauriers Day.
Deslauriers appeared in exactly one playoff game during Carolina’s 16-3 march to the Cup. One. He dressed, he watched, he waited, and when the confetti settled, he got to lift the thing anyway. That is the beautiful, egalitarian absurdity of hockey — the fourth-line grinder who played five postseason minutes gets the same silver chalice on his balcony that the Conn Smythe winner gets. The Cup does not care about your ice time.
Before this spring, Deslauriers had made the playoffs exactly once in his entire career — five appearances with the Minnesota Wild in 2021-22. He went from a Flyers team that was nowhere near contention to a Hurricanes roster that lost three games total across four rounds. The trade deadline move that Flyers GM Danny Briere made turned a depth forward’s lost season into a championship ring.
“Obviously, when I was with the Flyers for three, three and a half years, you wish that you win it with them,” Deslauriers told Philly Hockey Now at Seaport Pier. “You gotta give credit to Danny B. He gave me a chance to go somewhere else, and you know, this is still home for us. We love it here. My family loves it in Jersey.”
He signed a two-year extension to stay in Raleigh, where he slid into a role he described as “like being an assistant coach, really.” The Hurricanes’ coaching staff — headlined by Rod Brind’Amour, whom Deslauriers called “an unbelievable human being” — leaned on the 34-year-old’s veteran presence even when his name was not on the game sheet.
“It’s crazy. This whole year was kind of a whirlwind,” Deslauriers said. “A lot of things going my way and not, but you know the career I had. Your main goal is to make it to the NHL. Then staying is another thing, and then looking at that thing is fucking fantastic.”
What made the Wildwood scene work was the crowd. Flyers fans — orange and black, the whole palette — packed the pier to celebrate a guy who played 62 games for them this season before getting shipped out. Deslauriers noticed. He had watched from Raleigh as Philadelphia pushed into the playoffs for the first time in years, and he liked what he saw from his former club.
“I’m proud about what the Flyers did,” he said. “They pushed it to the end and got in and saw something special. It’s a great fan base. They deserve to go to the playoffs as they did, and then they deserve to do something else.”
So a grinder who played one playoff game got a holiday named after him on the Jersey Shore, surrounded by fans of the team that traded him away two months before he won it all. Hockey is the only sport where this story makes complete sense.