Rod Brind’Amour has a new contract that will keep him as the Carolina Hurricanes’ head coach.
During a news conference Thursday morning, Hurricanes general manager Don Waddell announced Brind’Amour has agreed to a three-year contract extension.
“Don and I talked throughout the year,” Brind’Amour said. “I thought we were on the same page. It was just a matter of time, really. He knew I wanted to be part of this and I knew he wanted me to be part of this, too. So we figured it out.”
Financial details of the contract were not disclosed.
Brind’Amour is a finalist for the NHL’s Jack Adams Award, which goes to the league’s coach of the year, along with Florida’s Joel Quenneville and Minnesota’s Dean Evason.
Brind’Amour, whose name has been linked to coaching vacancies that include the expansion Seattle Kraken, has led the Hurricanes to the playoffs in each of his three years as their head coach, including a Central Division championship this season. That was the team’s first division title since the 2005-06 Stanley Cup championship season when Brind’Amour was still playing for the Canes.
His $600,000 salary over the past three seasons made him one of the NHL’s lowest-paid head coaches. Gerard Gallant, hired as the New York Rangers head coach on Wednesday, reportedly will make $3.5 million a year on his four-year deal.
Brind’Amour said Thursday those numbers aren’t most important to him, though.
“I want to make a real good point here,” Brind’Amour said, “and that is that finances and money, that’s part of it. But I feel like I’m the richest coach in the league because I have a relationship with my owner and my GM that I don’t know that a lot of coaches have, to have influence on who they are picking up and who they are trying to keep. Then how many coaches can do their job where they live and where they are from and who has had a footprint on everything that’s gone on here over the last 20 years? I don’t know what kind of value you can put on that. I feel pretty fortunate to get to do that.”
Other NHL teams without a head coach are the Buffalo Sabres, Arizona Coyotes, Seattle and the Montreal Canadiens, who are still alive in the playoffs with interim head coach Dominique Ducharme behind the bench.
Waddell, though, knew Brind’Amour’s heart is in Carolina.
“Rod has stated very clearly that he wants to be a Hurricane,” Waddell said.
While admitting the “temptation” is always there and it’s hard to ignore what he called “outside noise,” Brind’Amour said he never considered leaving the Hurricanes for another coaching job.
“I would have a hard time thinking I could do the same job I’m doing here somewhere else, because this is a part of me,” Brind’Amour said. “You know, this place, I’ve been here forever.”
Though the deal had been discussed for months, Brind’Amour said final details involving the entire staff had to be worked out before it could be completed.
“We have a special group down here and for me to do this job, to the best of my ability, it’s important to have the right people around me,” Brind’Amour said. “I know, it’s down here. I know we have the great training staff, equipment, people, the coaches. So that’s why I think part of it took so long is a lot of people we had to figure out. So we’re at that point where we’ve pretty much done that.”
Waddell said the relationship he and Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon have built with Brind’Amour made this a fairly easy deal to complete.
“When you’re around the group and around Rod like I am you build a relationship, and you can sit down and talk about anything,” Waddell said. “We talked about everything you possibly can think about. And so it’s just a matter of coming to a deal from a financial end. Obviously, Tom was very supportive of it and involved in and we talked early on that it was important to get the whole group done.”
