The Carolina Hurricanes released the engraving list for their 2026 Stanley Cup this week, and the first seven names on it belong to owner Tom Dundon, his wife Veruschka, and their five children.
Not the captain. Not the coach. The owner’s family, occupying the top two of the 15 lines Carolina gets on the most famous trophy in sports.
The Names Come Before the Team
Yahoo Sports reported that Dundon’s wife and children, Caden, Dax, Drew, Blake, and Tagan, lead the Hurricanes’ engraving block, ahead of every player, coach, and hockey-operations staffer who actually built the championship roster. None of them holds a role with the organization. Some of them are minors.
The Stanley Cup is not like other trophies, which is why this stings the way it does. Every name on it is supposed to be earned. Players spend their whole careers chasing those few square inches of silver, and teams routinely agonize over which trainers, scouts, and video coordinators make the cut, because the space is strictly limited and somebody always gets left off. When two of your 15 lines go to the owner’s household, that is two lines of someone’s life’s work traded for a family keepsake.
He Is Not the First, Which Is Exactly the Problem
Here is the uncomfortable part: Dundon did not break a rule. He followed a precedent that has been quietly hardening into custom. ABC11 in Raleigh noted that Florida Panthers owner Vincent Viola put his wife Teresa and their three sons on the Cup after both of the Panthers’ back-to-back wins in 2024 and 2025, so the Viola family is on hockey’s holy grail twice. The league shrugged then, and it will shrug now.
That is how norms die, incidentally. Not with a rule change but with a shrug, then another, until the unusual becomes the expected. The Cup’s engraving tradition survived a century because owners treated those lines as belonging to the people who did the work. The last few years suggest a different theory of ownership: I bought the team, so I bought the trophy.
The Timing Could Not Be Worse
What turned a hockey-blog grumble into a full trending moment is that Dundon is currently the most scrutinized owner in two leagues at once. He led the group that bought the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers for $4.25 billion in March, and Portland fans have spent the spring compiling receipts on his cost-cutting, including the detail that the Blazers were reportedly the only road team in the entire playoff field that did not fly its two-way players to San Antonio for their first-round series. The nickname making the rounds is “El Cheapo,” which is not the branding you want in your first year owning a team.
So the split screen writes itself: an owner who would not spring for extra plane seats for his own players found room for five of his kids on the Stanley Cup. Both decisions are small in dollar terms. Both are enormous in what they signal about whose names, and whose comfort, an owner thinks matter.
None of this erases what the Hurricanes did on the ice. We covered the franchise’s first championship of the Dundon era when Carolina finally lifted the Cup in June, and that team earned every bit of it. Which is sort of the point. The players’ claim on that silver is unambiguous. The owner’s family’s claim is that they know the guy who signs the checks.
What to Watch
The NHL is not going to legislate this. The Hall of Fame keepers of the Cup engrave what the winning franchise submits, and no commissioner wants a public fight with a billionaire over etiquette. If the practice stops, it stops the way it started: with an owner reading the room. The next team to win the Cup now faces a genuinely interesting choice, because doing the traditional thing, engraving only the people who work in hockey, will itself read as a statement.
And Dundon has given fans in two cities a very simple test for everything he does next. When the choice is between the people who build the team and the people who own it, they now have a pretty good guess about which way he leans.