By Brant Wilkerson-New
April 17, 2019

RALEIGH — It’s a long way from videotaping Greensboro Monarchs games at the Coliseum and it’s even further from ice skating at Carolina Circle Mall, back in the days of a tiny rink that too-often ended up with standing water on warm days.

From a kid who grew up in Greensboro with the crazy dream of making it in hockey to the first North Carolinian with his name etched on the Stanley Cup, Chris Huffine is still living the dream in his 19th season as the Carolina Hurricanes’ video coach.

Admittedly, that dream might be a little different than those who grew up with NHL aspirations.

“I don’t have a lot of windows and I don’t see daylight a lot,” he said, laughing.

With three laptops set up on his desk below a massive television, Huffine has watched thousands of hours of video of both the Hurricanes and their opponents this season, looking for any detail or tendency that can be corrected or exploited in pursuit of another victory in the club’s turnaround season.

This time of year is prime time for Huffine, as the Hurricanes look to even their Stanley Cup Playoffs series with the Washington Capitals on Thursday night after Carolina whipped the defending champions 5-0 Monday in the franchise’s first home playoff game since 2009.

Breaking down video is always fun for the Smith High School graduate, but it’s even more fun when he has an opportunity to dig into an opponent’s playoff trove.

“When you’re playing a team and you see them once and you don’t see them again for 30 games, you don’t want to monkey around so much with your system and how you play during the regular season,” he said. “When you get to the playoffs, that’s what makes it fun for me, because you can get detailed.”

From Greensboro to the NHL

Huffine is the rare hockey-lifer who actually grew up in North Carolina, falling in love with the game because of his brother and father, who picked up hockey during his time in the military, stationed near Germany’s border with Czechoslovakia.

The Greensboro Generals of the Eastern Hockey League reinforced that affinity for the game, but before he could blossom as a player, the franchise and league folded in 1977, largely taking the area’s interest in the game and available ice time.

It wasn’t until the Greensboro Monarchs arrived in 1989 that Huffine would get another chance to pursue a career in hockey, volunteering to film games with a camcorder for the city’s new ECHL franchise.

“I’ve spent a lot of hours at a hockey rink, lot of hours behind the camera, lot of hours in every facet of hockey,” he said. “In the East Coast league, you’re part trainer, part handyman, part everything.”

His association with the Monarchs led to a couple of key relationships along the way. In 1995, the Monarchs affiliated with the Florida Panthers of the NHL, bringing in a staff that included assistant coach Jon Christiano, one of the pioneers of video coaching in the league and currently the Buffalo Sabres’ director of pro scouting.

When the Hartford Whalers decided to relocate to North Carolina and become the Hurricanes, it was Christiano who helped facilitate an introduction between Huffine and then-Hurricanes coach Paul Maurice.

Given Huffine was already set up to shoot hockey in the Coliseum and familiar with the building, Maurice and the Hurricanes gave him a shot to prove himself, starting with the 1997-98 season when the club played its home games in Greensboro.

“It’s one of those things where you have to have yourself positioned when the door opens, you’re willing to take a leap of faith and step in,” he said. “Everything came together, magically, where I got an opportunity.”

Magical would be another way of describing the evolution of his job and the technology that it uses, going from shooting games on a camcorder to the Hurricanes’ current setup, with includes multiple camera angles streamed into the XOS Digital system, saving every second of every game into an easily accessible format.

Huffine watches games from his desk in the coaches’ office, just several steps down the tunnel from the Hurricanes bench. There, he tags plays in real-time for coaches and players to access later.

If Coach Rod Brind’Amour wants to view every power play shot? A few clicks from Huffine ensure it will end up in the right place. How about figuring out how the Capitals are taking advantage of faceoffs? In seconds, it’s queued up.

Literally, seconds later, coaches can grab one of the iPads in the holsters behind the Hurricanes’ bench and show them a particular coaching point. If coaches have a particular question, they shoot a quick request back over the headset and their video will be loaded to XOS within seconds.

They also serve a valuable role in reviewing video for challenges, such as the one that Huffine and fellow video LJ Scarpace called for in Toronto on April 2, as a review found the Maple Leafs were offside, causing a goal to be disallowed.

Three times this season, Brind’Amour credited the video staff with catching something on video that resulted in a successful challenge.

"We've got great video guys back here in Huff and LJ. It was kind of a bad break to begin with. We knock it out of the air, kind of a bang-bang thing," Brind'Amour told Hurricanes.com that night. "It was a break, for sure, but you need those at this time of year."

Between periods when the coaching staff huddles, Huffine can have any variety of clips prepared that Brind’Amour might want to show the team in the dressing room.

“Those are some of the innovations, I quite honestly, never dreamed of having,” Huffine said. “The way technology is going, I’m not sure how much higher than they can get.”

Capitalizing on focus

Believe it or not, the playoffs are less challenging in some ways for Huffine and the video staff.

During the regular season, he spends time after each game organizing the Hurricanes’ video before often digging into the next opponent’s video, going back over the past three games to pull clips and prepare what Carolina’s coaches will show the players the next morning at practice. That leads to many late nights and early mornings.

That changes in the playoffs.

With only one opponent on the schedule, Huffine’s pre-scouting work before the series sets a foundation for what the Hurricanes will expect to see. Given the familiarity between conference opponents and the amount of video available, there are no secrets at this point, and that’s particularly true for Carolina and Washington, given they played a back-to-back on March 26 and 28.

The real work begins after the first game of a playoff series, when the opponent either confirms or disproves what Huffine put in his pre-scout.

“It lines up everything that I saw right away,” he said. “If there are some things I saw that were different, you go, 'Oh, wait a minute, that’s different. Is that a one-off?' You can pattern teams, you can pattern players, and you can pattern goalies.”

With the chance to focus on one opponent, there’s also the chance of going too far.

“You can almost do too much, and that’s what usually happens in preparation in the playoffs,” Huffine said. “You still have to play the game on the ice and you still have to win the one-on-one battles … sometimes you get caught up so much in this you overthink things, when it’s really a simple sport that we make difficult.”

Never overthinking or underworking

Huffine is mindful of overthinking what he’s seeing, but that doesn’t mean he misses any details or shortens his office hours.

At his heart, he still finds the same joy in the work that he found when he was cutting tapes from a camcorder for the Monarchs when he just wanted a chance.

“I’m most proud of my work ethic and hopefully the way that my passion bleeds in,“ he said. “This is a working position. This isn’t a glamorous position; we’re behind the scenes totally and really, the only people that know the value of video are the coaches.”

Hurricanes center Jordan Martinook said he wasn’t a big video guy, but “A huge Huff guy.”

“I think that’s probably one of the hardest-working guys on our team right there,” he said. “You look at the amount of video he watches and the things he puts together, it’s one of those things where you have to take a step back to see how much work he does.”