After seeing their season end at the hands of the Boston Bruins and Tampa Bay Lightning in the past two seasons, the Carolina Hurricanes realized that Justin Williams wasn’t walking through that door - at least, not as a player. For all the playoff experience they had gained after wandering the wilderness for a decade, they were painfully short on grizzled veterans with Stanley Cups on their resumes. Jordan Staal is a superman, but even he can only do so much on his own.
Enter Ian Cole, the well-traveled defenseman who won two Cups with the Penguins and was universally regarded as one of the better locker-room guys in the NHL.