Let's do that hockey.

Last weekend, the Carolina Hurricanes hoisted the Stanley Cup for the first time in 20 years. That is a big deal all on its own, and plenty of people spent the week afterward reminiscing about the team, the fans, and their fantastic playoff run.

But I thought to myself: what is the most Rabbit Hole angle here? What’s inconsequential, but may also contain multitudes? I found the answer on the shoulder of the road jerseys for the Carolina Hurricanes. There, you can find a patch depicting a cartoon pig in mid-stride. He’s wearing a sweater with a Carolina Hurricanes “C” on it. He's kind of smirking. He’s wearing a sailor hat that says “Canes.” This logo is called Struttin’ Stormy, and it is unlike anything else in the NHL today. So how did did this pig end up on a jersey that’s now going to be immortal?

This story took me to a places I did not expect, from grumpy executives in the NHL league offices to a small town in South Dakota. This week, I spoke to the three people who brought the logo to life, and put Struttin’ Stormy just inches away from the Stanley Cup itself.

These conversations have been edited for brevity and clarity. You can also listen to this story as a podcast episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

North Carolina Rabbit Hole: We’ll get to the logo, but first, what is the greatest Canes tweet of all time?

Dan LaTorraca, former Canes VP of Marketing and Brand Strategy: Man, I wasn't ready for that question. There's a couple that I'm very partial to that still will make me giggle. When we unveiled our previous road uniform with the diagonal word mark on it several years ago, the Rangers commented on it, implying that we were not being creative by having a diagonal word mark across the front of the jersey. And I remember sitting in my office thinking: What's the best reply to that? And what I came up with was: It's a huge honor for the inventor of diagonal to tweet at us.

And then it became a meme a little bit after that. I always liked that one.

And I was really passionate about the the Cameo video we did against the Devils.

Rabbit Hole: Is this your personality? Are you like, I am going to troll you in a way that makes you think: I don't know if I’m mad. I'm kind of impressed.

LaTorraca: I mean, you've known me a long time, Jeremy. I don't make fun of my friends. I really try not to, but when you represent a team, especially in a market like the Carolinas, where it's the first generation of fans, and there's always a much-needed chip on the shoulder because it's a smaller market and hasn't been around as long. It's the New Jersey in me to stick up for people. But that's probably not my personal style of humor. It's just marketing.

Rabbit Hole: You were the voice behind the Canes when it came to Twitter, but what else did you do when you were working with them?

LaTorraca: Before I left, I was overseeing a couple departments: Our overall marketing, which contained digital and traditional branding and advertising, as well as our creative services team, which was anything design- and production-related. That could be anything from flyers and signage to uniforms.

I oversaw photography, video production, and in-game content production. Retail was the other piece there, like the great merch that we sell, from Bunch of Jerks to all the other fun things as well.

Rabbit Hole: One of the things that I thought was interesting was this little cartoony logo that showed up on the shoulder of the away uniforms this season. It's a pig because the mascot, Stormy, is a pig. But he is dressed in a particular way. How did he get from somebody's brain to now, where it's gonna be in every 2026 Stanley Cup image?

LaTorraca: I've been giggling and texting a few people about that for the past week now because it's wild. But to give you the full timeline of it: I'm a creative at heart for sure. I also grew up in the northeast. And when I first moved down to the Carolinas to work for the Panthers, one of the first questions people would ask me was: Where did you go to school? I am a proud University of Scranton and Canisius University alum.

Look, college athletics are not a huge deal in the Northeast. I grew up a pro sports fan. but I never realized how big it is in the Southeast and in the Carolinas. It blew me away. I always was drawn to those vintage strutting logos. I loved that design and was always a little envious too. I often would look at sports design forums and things like that. And I always had the idea of doing something like this. But then it really clicked when I saw this one artist on the sportslogos.net message board who specialized in this. His name is Ross Hettinger, he lives out in South Dakota, and I really loved his work. So I was like: Hey, you know what? I'm gonna reach out to this person and see if they'd be interested in working with us on this.

Ross Hettinger, artist: I'm primarily an art teacher at a middle school in Aberdeen, South Dakota. But I also do mascot logo design. I've been drawing since I was very little. I actually went to school for graphic design, but then kinda shifted towards regular visual arts, and did painting and sculpture and that kind of stuff. I ended up changing again to art education because I had a lot of teachers in my family. I got in with the school district here pretty much right after I graduated, so I've actually been at the same school for fifteen years now.

Rabbit Hole: How did you get into designing these retro mascots?

Hettinger: Other than drawing as I was growing up, I was also in in sports. I was a ranch kid. If I didn't have a sport to do after school, then I went home and had to pitch hay and do chores and stuff. So I was very into sports. I'm into basketball and football. My bridge between art and sports were the sports logos.

I ended up finding Chris Creamer's sports logo boards online, and so I would put concepts on there and stuff. I shifted towards the more vintage style ones, especially the college ones because they they have such a nostalgic feel.

I started finding any images that I could and made myself a database of different college mascots. I made a jackrabbit for my alma mater, SDSU. And I did it in a vintage style. It kind of jumped off and I thought, well, there's probably other schools out there that don't have a vintage logo with a sailor hat. And so I did a deer and a bison and a pronghorn, because those are the animals around here that I've drawn realistically many times.

Rabbit Hole: You went to school for this, but in this particular discipline, you might be a little more self-taught.

Hettinger: I would say so.

Rabbit Hole: Were you getting attention for this?

Hettinger: Yeah, with the fan bases and stuff. I would post some things as T-shirt designs. People liked those. On the sports logo boards, people really liked them more than I actually knew. I always had to make a logo and put it out there and move on to the next thing. But it's just kind of a compulsion almost to create them.

Rabbit Hole: How did Struttin’ Stormy come about?

Hettinger: Dan LaTorraca contacted me at the end of 2021 and said: Hey, I saw your stuff on the sports logo boards and wanted to see if you'd be interested in doing this. I said: Absolutely.

LaTorraca: He was fantastic to work with. My intention was that it'll be a fun retail play. You know, something we can throw on a t-shirt, a car decal, hat, sweatshirt, just something fun because it fits with the Canes unique brand. You know, we're in a college sports mecca in the Triangle. The Canes and the NC Courage are the pro teams here in the Triangle that unify the different college fan bases, which obviously have a bitter rivalry.

It's unique to the brand in the way that tailgating is, because of the college culture that exists in the region. it just was a natural, fun nod to the colleges, to create something that's uniquely ours in the NHL, and to sell some fun, cool merch. And that's what it's all about within sports is, you know, doing things that fans will like and enjoy. And sometimes you can do stuff that you enjoy too.

Hettinger: I think it was in February of 2022 that I sent my first pass of Stormy. And so I just sent him a picture of the the sketch that I did. And after we got the look figured out in pencil, I scanned it in, got my line work done, and started sending them some different color samples on how the colors could be arranged. He took those to his team and they figured out how they wanted that to look. It was a pretty smooth process, actually.

Rabbit Hole: What is it like to get a call from a pro sports team? It sounds like maybe your mindset was more like: I do this 'cause I think it's kinda fun and cool and it's something I feel like I need to do. And then an actual team says: Can you do that for us?

Hettinger: Disbelief essentially. My first thought: Dan's not really with the Canes. I'd been burned before, not by people claiming to be from a sports team, just projects where they say, Hey, can you do this? And then I never hear from them again. That kind of thing. And so I looked him up and I was like: He worked worked with the Panthers and now he’s with the Carolina Hurricanes. So yeah, it was pretty surreal.

Rabbit Hole: Did you ever think: How did they find me, an art teacher in South Dakota?

Hettinger: I don't get a lot of commissions all over the place. Like I've done high schools and I did work for the University of Tennessee just in the last couple of years. But at the time that this was happening, it was kind of a cold call in a way. Like they cold called me. And I'd been putting out cold calls to teams for a long time, and I'd either get the direct no or just never hear from them.

In a way, it wasn't even work on my part. I was putting out a lot of stuff on boards and I kind of had a portfolio page. And so every once in a while I would just do a random Google of a vintage sports logo, and quite a few of mine would pop up in search results.

Rabbit Hole: I don't know if compulsion or obsession with these logos is the right word, but that ends up turning out to be a pretty good SEO strategy, right?

Hettinger: I mean, that was never a a true strategy on my part, but it just kinda ended up working out that way.

And, you know, where Stormy is now is not what I expected either.

LaTorraca: A lot of fans saw this vintage Stormy thing in the store, and they were like, this has to be for the Stadium Series game. It wasn't, which led to some fun, organic posting and word of mouth of this thing getting out there. And we didn't confirm or deny. It just ended up being something that took on a life of its own. Fans loved it and embraced it. It wasn't wasn't something we used a ton in our media or our content. It was just a fun retail play.

And when Doug Warf became team president a couple of years back, and he really liked the design.

Doug Warf, former Hurricanes team president: I am now a senior advisor to Governor Stein, but I did two different stints with the Canes. I did a 17-year stint that ended in 2017 where I left as VP of marketing, and then I came back as president.

I'll take a little bit of a step back. Struttin’ Stormy is Dan LaTorraca’s brainchild. He, Mike Forman, and the marketing team had the idea for it. They had Ross Hettinger design it while I was kind of in my time in between working for the Canes. So I was a fan when the mark came out.

On the marketing side of my brain, when I saw it, I was like, man, I love that. I was kind of envious that I didn't think of it.

I always loved the mark. When I came back, they wanted to change the road jersey. The owner and our team really loved the 2023 Stadium Series jersey. The idea was kind of creating the inverse for that for a road jersey.

The key things that weren't done yet were the shoulder patches. One was kind of easy. The fans have always loved the state flag. We put that on a third jersey years ago and has kind of always been a fan favorite.

The other shoulder was the one that was a little bit more challenging. And I brought up Struttin’ Stormy. Dan loved it. I think in the past, I didn't know this immediately, but I think there had been one or two folks at the NHL who didn't always love the logo. So I think that was where they needed me to do a little fighting for Struttin’ Stormy.

Rabbit Hole: What what does that look like?

Warf: You gotta be a good salesperson, Jeremy. (laughing) You know, I think it helped that our team was really bought in on it. Our owner liked it. Tom Dundon always likes to push the envelope a little bit. And I do think the mark is, I don't want to call it irreverent, but it's just different. And there are folks in the league sometimes who slightly averse to change. So it was just letting them know: Hey, we're all behind this. We all want to do it. Our fans are behind it. We were able to talk about how well some of the merch had sold. I think that helped convince, them but it was also one of those things that I didn't really want to back down from.

I knew it wasn't something that they could withhold from the jersey because it didn't violate any of their rules. And even if you throw it back, I mean, Pucky the Whale was on Whalers’ jersey shoulders at some time. So it's it's not like it's this ridiculous idea that had never been done.

LaTorraca: It ultimately took some internal pushing and it ended up on a uniform. And once something is on a uniform, then it's officially part of your brand. It's part of NHL history, which is what we're seeing now. This uniform that came together really quickly that had a fun cartoon pig on it is now immortalized forever with the Stanley Cup win of the Carolina Hurricanes. To me, that's awesome. We've seen people get tattoos of it now. And it was all just a little fun idea. That's the beauty of sports marketing is that some little spark like that can turn into something really, really special and sometimes immortal.

Rabbit Hole: What is It like to see that team win the Stanley Cup?

Warf: Well, winning the Stanley Cup is one thing. The community support the team has right now? I think that’s what those of us who worked there in the early days take so much pride in. There were a lot of foundational bricks that were laid—In the ‘02 run, the ‘06 run, ‘09, the 2011 All-Star Game—that were hard, right? That was back when we were scrounging around for fans and going to events where three or four people would show.

You know, in 2006 my own family, who are spread around the Carolinas—I had a family member call me and say, Hey, it's great that you guys have a female that plays on the team. And I was like: I’m not against that, but we don't. What makes you think that we do? And she's like, well, they keep saying Brenda Moore is playing really well. That's where we were in 2006. That was my own family.

And now to see Stanley Cup road games where the Lenovo Center is sold out for a watch party, there's probably another 15,000 people outside, there's 7,000 people at Red Hat to watch, there's watch parties at every bar. I mean, I you know, there are tears of happiness from that, whether we won the Cup or not.

Rabbit Hole: Do you think it's kinda cool that an idea that you brought into reality with a lot of help, is now part of like every image of the Canes raising the Cup?

Warf: I hope it is the symbolism of us against the world for our fans. And I think that's what we thought of when we were putting it on. We knew that almost all of our fans would love this.

They would get the homage to whatever college they're aligned with in North Carolina. And so I think that there's this little bit of Bunch of Jerks that comes through with that logo being on the shoulder that we all playfully love.

Rabbit Hole: You know, Ross, it was on T-shirts. Now you can buy a jersey with your logo on it.

Hettinger: I mean the only word that comes to mind is surreal. I still have a hard time coming to terms with it.

I was watching the Stanley Cup finals every chance I could get the TV from my kids. And I'd point out: Hey look, see that on on the shoulder? That's the thing that's on that shirt that dad has. My kids are just like, that's cool. Can we turn our shows back on now? (laughing)

I don't wanna feel like a salesman all the time. I don't boast about that kind of stuff, or I try not to, but I'd love to be able to just tell everybody, hey, you see that? That's me. You know that meme of Leonardo DiCaprio from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where he's snapping his fingers and pointing at the TV? I feel like that all the time.

Rabbit Hole: Do your art students know about this?

Hettinger: Yeah. I have some hockey players in my classes and they think it's pretty cool. But you know, they're middle schoolers, so they don't wanna let the teacher know that they think what the teacher does is too cool.

Rabbit Hole: So as the guy who designed it and put this thing into the world, what does this all mean to you?

Hettinger: Looking at all those vintage logos, they were all designed by Arthur Evans from the Angelus Pacific company way back when. He designed about 90 percent of all college mascots. And nobody really knows him. You know, you can search it up and figure it out.

I feel like that’s where I’m gonna end up falling with Stormy, you know. I'll always know that it was mine, that I created that. I feel like a lot of people won't. And it'll be one of those things where I say: By the way, I did this. Really? That crazy, you know?