RALEIGH, N.C. — When Dean Lombardi emerged from a backroom where he had been chugging a beer and puffing on a cigarette, the general manager of the just-crowned Stanley Cup champion Los Angeles Kings had something to say before taking questions from reporters.Amidst all the celebrations at Staples Center that night on June 11, 2012, after the franchise won its first-ever NHL championship, Lombardi wanted to make sure the guy who preceded him as general manager got his credit, too.“Let’s get something straight here, whenever a team has won, there’s some guys that don’t get appreciated,” Lombardi said. “You have to give a lot of credit to (former Kings GM) Dave Taylor. I started out with three darn good players in (Dustin) Brown, (Anze) Kopitar and (Jonathan) Quick. Let’s not ever forget what he did. And let’s not forget (former coach) Terry Murray, too. He stabilized this franchise and gave us credibility. There’s some unsung heroes here that need to be appreciated.”All class by Lombardi. But a reminder that contending teams are years and years in the making and more often than not have several different imprints on them.That brings us to Don Waddell. He was GM of the Carolina Hurricanes from May 2018 to May 2024 and with the team for 10 years overall, first joining as president on the business side. The Hurricanes are not here at the 2026 Stanley Cup Final without the work Waddell did in those years, both on the hockey side and on the business side.“Don did amazing work here,” Canes GM Eric Tulsky told The Athletic over the weekend. “I think he was the only GM in the league who also ran the business side of the organization. During his tenure, obviously, we started to have more success on the ice, but not everyone realizes how much improvement there was in the fan experience and business performance.”The Hurricanes missed the playoffs nine years in a row before Waddell was named GM. They’ve made it to the postseason every year since.“He helped the winning, and winning is the business,” owner Tom Dundon told The Athletic over the weekend.Two years after his exit from Carolina to become GM and president of hockey operations in Columbus, Waddell absolutely has a tinge of pride to see his old team get to the final.“Yes, 100 percent,” Waddell told The Athletic over the weekend. “We got to the conference finals twice when I was there, and we just couldn’t get over the hump. For them to reach the final now, Roddy (Brind’Amour) and his coaching staff have done a great job, and they’re being rewarded for it. It’s great for the fans. Those fans have shown up every night for a lot of years. It took us a while to build it up, but once we got it going, the fans jumped on board and stuck with it. They deserve it.”When Waddell was first hired as president on the business side in May of 2014, there was a lot of work to be done. And that work is an equally big part of his legacy.