What a story Brandon Bussi has become. After serving as Carolina's backup goalie for three rounds, the 27-year-old stepped in mid-Stanley Cup Final for a struggling Frederik Andersen and helped the Hurricanes win three straight games to clinch their first title since 2006. In Sunday night's decisive Game 6, he stopped all 22 shots he faced in a 3-0 shutout.
In Boston, Bussi's heroics present a great opportunity to pile on. Bussi spent three years in the Bruins organization after signing out of Western Michigan University in 2022. He walked away as a free agent last summer with zero NHL games to his name. The Bruins got nothing in return.
On the surface, the pile-on seems fair. They had this young-ish goalie, capable of winning games in a Stanley Cup Final, right under their nose, and they lost him for nothing after never even giving him a chance?
Let's revisit how all of this actually played out, though. Because there's some revisionism happening that just doesn't align with reality.
The place to start is the summer and fall of 2024. That June, the Bruins traded Linus Ullmark to Ottawa for a 2024 first-round pick (which Boston used on Dean Letourneau), forward Mark Kastelic, and goalie Joonas Korpisalo.
Bussi had two good AHL seasons under his belt at that point and had just signed a one-year extension for the 2024-25 season. The Ullmark-Jeremy Swayman tandem that was blocking his path to the NHL was finally broken up, but now there was Korpisalo, an NHL veteran coming off a bad year, to contend with.
This is where the story gets twisted a bit. Those who want to rip the Bruins and general manager Don Sweeney over this will say Bussi never got a chance. They'll say Korpisalo was just handed the NHL backup job and the Bruins had already made up their mind that Bussi was going back to Providence.
That's not what happened, though. Korpisalo and Bussi (and Michael DiPietro) saw a lot of time in net during training camp and preseason action in September 2024. Remember: that's the year Swayman's contract negotiations dragged on until the eve of the regular season. He wasn't in camp, so Korpisalo and Bussi both got what essentially mounted to a starter's workload.
And Korpisalo outplayed Bussi. Pretty convincingly, in fact. Korpisalo stopped 44 of the 47 shots he faced in his two preseason starts for a .936 save percentage. In his three starts, Bussi gave up seven goals on 58 shots for an .879 save percentage. Korpisalo looked like a perfectly solid vet who was ready for the season. Bussi looked shaky and not ready to take advantage of the opportunity.
Had Swayman's negotiations carried into the regular season, perhaps Bussi would've stuck around, backed up Korpisalo, and gotten some regular-season action at some point. Maybe he would've played better than he did in the preseason.
But once Swayman signed, the decision on who would back him up was an easy one. There had been a competition that had played out over the course of three-plus weeks, and Korpisalo had won it. The Bruins waived Bussi, and no other team claimed him. Boston had determined he wasn't ready for the NHL, and 31 other teams agreed.
The next chapter in this story played out over the course of the 2024-25 season. In Providence that year, Bussi was not the P-Bruins' best goalie. That was clearly Michael DiPietro, who went 26-8-7 with a .927 save percentage and earned AHL Goalie of the Year honors. Bussi had his worst professional season, going 15-14-4 with a .907 save percentage.
In the 2025 offseason, Bussi (27) and DiPietro (26) were both free agents. Realistically, the Bruins were only going to keep one. Neither was really still a "prospect" at that point, so it made sense to find someone younger to be the second goalie in Providence (enter 23-year-old Simon Zajicek). DiPietro was a year younger than Bussi and had just outplayed him pretty convincingly over the course of an AHL season, so the Bruins kept DiPietro and allowed Bussi to explore other opportunities.
Bussi initially signed with the defending Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers, but he couldn't win a job with them in camp, so they waived him. The Hurricanes, in a twist of fate, had just lost projected starter Pyotr Kochetkov to injury and now needed someone to pair with Andersen. So, they claimed Bussi off waivers and the rest is history. Bussi had a great first half, fell off in the second half and ceded the starting job to Andersen, but then proved himself ready when he finally got back in the net in Game 3 of the Stanley Cup Final.
It's a great story, and Bussi deserves a ton of credit for persevering and making the most of his NHL opportunity when it finally arrived.
Maybe Bussi should have at least gotten a look in an NHL regular-season game at some point in Boston. That's fair enough. But acting like the Bruins made some sort of catastrophic miscalculation with Bussi is a bit rich. Bussi hadn't forced their hand in the 2024 preseason or throughout the 2024-25 season. The Bruins had found a better AHL goalie in DiPietro, who was the AHL Goalie of the Year again in 2025-26.
Looking ahead, the Bruins are now faced with a similar situation heading into the 2026-27 season. DiPietro is under contract, so he can't walk away as a free agent, but the Bruins could lose him on waivers if he doesn't stick with Boston out of camp. It will be interesting to see if he, A) gets a real chance to compete with Korpisalo for the backup job behind Swayman, and B) is able to beat him out. It's also possible the Bruins just move Korpisalo in a trade this summer and clear the runway for DiPietro, something that never happened for Bussi.
