Brandon Bussi's dream took him from Sound Beach to Stanley Cup with Carolina Hurricanes

Brandon Bussi always held on to his childhood dream, through his first days in hockey and the first belief he could play in the NHL through the tougher times when playing for the right junior team or right NCAA Division I program was in question, and through three seasons in the AHL and three NHL organizations.

When he finished stopping all 22 shots he faced and the final buzzer sounded on June 14, the Hurricanes goalie from Sound Beach was a Stanley Cup champion, only the second from Long Island. Not bad for his first NHL season.

“That’s one of those things as a kid you dream about, right?” Bussi told Newsday in a phone interview on Monday. “When you go to bed at night and you close your eyes, you just imagine yourself hoisting it. Honestly, it exceeds expectations. It’s what you dream about and more.

“It was special for me. I saw my family and my friends and everyone that came in the crowd before I got it. I knew what route I was going to take so I could see them while lifting [the Cup].”

And yet, for Bussi, who turns 28 on Thursday and is marrying Mary Raclawski, who he met while both attended Western Michigan, within a month, being a Stanley Cup champion still doesn’t seem real. Perhaps, Bussi acknowledged, it will feel that way later this summer when he celebrates his day with the Cup on Long Island.

“While being on the ice, it still really didn’t hit me,” Bussi said. “I’ve had moments here over the last week or so that it has hit me a little bit.”

Bussi, an undrafted free agent, spent three seasons in the Bruins organization without playing an NHL game before signing with the Panthers last offseason. The Panthers tried to sneak him through waivers to send him to the AHL just before the 2025-26 season started but the Hurricanes claimed him. He went 31-6-2 with a 2.47 goals-against average and .895 save percentage in the regular season and signed a three-year, $5.7 million extension on Feb. 16.

But Frederik Andersen started the first 16 playoff games for the Hurricanes — winning 13 — before Bussi took over for the third period of a 5-4 double overtime loss to Vegas in Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final. Bussi stayed in net as the Hurricanes won Game 4, 5-3, and Game 5, 4-2, before a 3-0 win in the decisive match.

The enormity of the situation never fazed Bussi.

“No, it was just a hockey game and stopping pucks,” Bussi said. “There was no pressure for the moment because being in that moment is what people dream about. People essentially envy us for the fact that we have the opportunity to do this because not everybody in their playing career that makes it to the NHL even steps on the ice in the Stanley Cup Final.

“I enjoyed the moment. I had fun. The most important thing to remind yourself during playoff time is to just be yourself. Nothing more, nothing less.”

For Bussi, being himself is always battling to achieve his goal.

He always wanted to be a goalie because his father, Robert, played and coached the position.

“When you start out 5 a.m. on a Thursday morning before school and you bring him to the clinic to get better and you watch him enjoy himself, you go, ‘Wow, he’s found something he really likes,’” Robert Bussi told Newsday. “I’m never thinking about pro hockey. Never. Even 14, 15, 16, you get tapped on the shoulder by would-be agents, you’re still not ever thinking about it. It’s just about the kid having fun, you know?”

But a positive conversation with Long Island-based agent John Kofi Osei-Tutu altered that thinking.

“John told us our son is going to be an NHL player, flat out,” Robert Bussi said.

“He was 17 years old,” Osei-Tutu told Newsday. “I was just starting out. I said, ‘I believe that Brandon has the propensity to one day be an NHL goalie and I’d like to help you on your journey towards that and I’m willing to do all of this for free. I had watched Brandon play on video a good amount of times, I knew his coach. He was a bigger kid. I knew he was athletic. I knew he was a hard worker. I was willing to bet that the work ethic and the rawness could materialize into what it has, which is a quality NHL goalie.”

The toughest stretch was 2017-18 with Bussi, then committed to playing collegiately for St. Lawrence, not getting ice time with Amarillo (Texas) of the junior North American Hockey League. Osei-Tutu’s told the Amarillo coach he would place Bussi with the lower tier P.A.L. Junior Islanders of the National Collegiate Development Conference.

“The guy told me, ‘You can go ahead and try that if you want, you’ll be laughed out of hockey. You don’t know what you’re doing,’” Osei-Tutu said.

But the move proved correct and Bussi wound up playing for Muskegon of the junior USHL in 2018-19 and at Western Michigan the following season.

“Brandon always wanted to go to the highest level,” Robert Bussi said. “John had that sit down with him after that year of junior, where it was rough for him, and said, ‘Look, this may not go D1 the way you want to do it.’ Brandon's response to him was, ‘Hell no, that's not going to happen that way.’

“We had breakfast at a diner in Syosset, which is the same diner we went to while we were in the middle of finalizing the extension that we did in February,” Osei-Tutu said. “I said, ‘Brandon, D1 may or may not be on the table for you. But if you want it to be on the table for you, we kind of have to go back to the drawing board on your training. You need to get with a strength coach. We need to get with a little bit more of a legitimized goalie regimen.”

It all led to the pinnacle of NHL success.

“John never gave up on me,” Brandon Bussi said. “He believed in me. He saw this as a possible end goal.”