The Carolina Hurricanes wasted little time in reaching an extension for trade-acquisition Taylor Hall.
The team announced Wednesday that Hall had signed a three-year, $9.5 million contract through the 2027-28 season. That came roughly three months after the Hurricanes traded for the former Hart Trophy winner as NHL MVP and with Carolina having advanced to the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
In a Zoom call with reporters, general manager Eric Tulsky said the two sides had been talking about a deal since January when the Hurricanes acquired Hall in the blockbuster deal centered on Mikko Rantanen's arrival. The 33-year-old Hall was making $6 million this year with free agency looming.
“Whether it’s playoffs or not, the conversations are happening,” Hall said. "With my family, we have a baby coming in the fall. Just as the playoffs were about to start, I think we were pretty much set on what the deal would look like. So that allowed me to just kind of play int he playoffs with a clear mind.
“And that’s important to me. I want to play as well as I can for this team.”
The announcement came a day after the Hurricanes closed out a five-game series against the New Jersey Devils. Hall scored the first of Carolina’s four second-period goals that helped them erase a 3-0 deficit before winning in double overtime.
“I don’t think either of us ever doubted that it would get done,” Tulsky said.
Hall, a 15-year veteran who won the Hart Trophy as the NHL’s MVP in the 2017-18 season, had 18 goals and 24 assists in 77 regular-season games between Chicago and Carolina. He also had two assists in the five-game series win against New Jersey. He had missed most of the previous season due to knee surgery but led Carolina skaters with four power-play goals in the regular season after his arrival.
Hall said he felt comfortable immediately after his arrival. Tulsky pointed to Hall's speed as the perfect fit for a philosophical approach built on an aggressive forecheck and controlling the puck on the offensive zone.
“I'm still picking up the finer points of more or less our D-zone system,” Hall said. “But the other two-thirds of the ice is about pressure and trying to get the puck back in our hands.
"I've had a lot of fun getting to play with this team and just the high-pressure system and way that we play, it allows me to play with not a lot of thinking and it allows me to just go out there and hunt — hunt down pucks and do all the things that I think I'm pretty good at.”
The Hurricanes acquired the former No. 1 overall draft pick on Jan. 24 in the three-team deal that snagged Rantanen from Colorado, though they later sent Rantanen to Dallas with forward Logan Stankoven as the primary trade-deadline return when it became clear Rantanen was unlikely to sign long-term to stay with Carolina.
AP NHL playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/NHL
Carolina Hurricanes' Andrei Svechnikov, center, celebrates his goal with Jesperi Kotkaniemi (82) and Taylor Hall (71) during the third period of Game 1 of an NHL hockey Stanley Cup first-round playoff series against the New Jersey Devils in Raleigh, N.C., Sunday, April 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Karl DeBlaker)
Carolina Hurricanes' Taylor Hall (71) leaps on top of the celebration for Sebastian Aho (20) game winning overtime goal during the second overtime period of Game 5 of an NHL hockey Stanley Cup first-round playoff series against the New Jersey Devils in Raleigh, N.C., Tuesday, April 29, 2025. (AP Photo/Karl DeBlaker)
NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP) — Former Cypriot President George Vassiliou, a successful businessman who helped to energize his divided island's economy and set it on the road to European Union membership, has died. He was 94.
Vassiliou died Wednesday after being hospitalized on Jan. 6 for a respiratory infection. Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides praised Vassiliou as a leader who became synonymous with the country's economic prosperity, social progress and push toward modernization.
“Cyprus has lost a universal citizen who broadened our homeland's international imprint,” Christodoulides said in a written statement.
His wife Androulla, a lawyer who twice served as a European commissioner, posted on X in the early hours Wednesday that her companion of 59 years “slipped away quietly in our arms” in hospital.
“It's difficult to say farewell to a man who was a superb husband and father, a man full of kindness and love for the country and its people,” she wrote.
When he became president in 1988, Vassiliou lifted hopes that a peace deal with the island's breakaway Turkish Cypriots was possible after more than a decade of off-again, on-again talks. He swiftly relaunched stalled reunification negotiations with Turkish Cypriot leader Rauf Denktash, but they ended at an impasse that continues today.
Cyprus was split into an internationally recognized Greek-speaking south and a Turkish-speaking north in 1974, when Turkey invaded the island after a coup aimed at uniting it with Greece. A Turkish Cypriot declaration of independence nine years later was recognized only by Turkey.
During an interview in 1989, one year into his five-year term as president, Vassiliou said: "The only dangerous thing for the Cyprus issue is to remain ... in a vacuum, forgotten and with no one taking any interest."
But Vassiliou succeeded on many other fronts, using his skills as a successful entrepreneur to modernize and expand his county’s economy, even though he had been raised by parents who were pro-communist.
Vassiliou was born in Cyprus in 1931 to two doctors who were activists and volunteered their services to the communist forces during the civil war that engulfed Greece in the immediate aftermath of World War II.
With the defeat of the communists in Greece in 1949, the Vassiliou family moved to Hungary and later Uzbekistan.
George Vassiliou initially studied medicine in Geneva and Vienna, but he later switched to economics, earning a doctorate from the University of Economics in Budapest.
After a brief stint doing marketing in London, Vassiliou returned to Cyprus in 1962, and he began a successful business career that made him a millionaire. He founded the Middle East Market Research Bureau, a consultancy business that grew to have offices in 30 countries in the Middle East, South Africa, eastern and central Europe.
In 1987, Vassilou was elected president of Cyprus as an independent entrepreneur who also was supported by the island's powerful communist party AKEL, which his father had one been a prominent member of.
Vassiliou bucked the staid political culture of the time by making the presidency more accessible to the public and visiting government offices and schools. That prompted some criticism that he was turning the presidency into a marketing pulpit.
"I consider it the president’s obligation to come in contact with the civil service," Vassiliou told Greek state TV. "I call this communication with youth. Some call it marketing. ... I call it the proper execution of the president's mission."
He also pushed through key reforms, including imposing a sales tax while slashing income taxes, streamlining a cumbersome civil service, establishing the first Cyprus university, and abolishing a state monopoly in electronic media. To make sure the world better understood the Cyprus peace process, he widely expanded a network of press offices at Cypriot diplomatic missions.
Through his tenure, the island's per capita gross domestic product almost doubled, culminating in possibly his most notable achievement as president — applying for full membership to the European Union, a goal achieved 13 years later.
Vassiliou lost the presidency in 1993 to Glafcos Clerides, who appointed his rival as Cyprus' chief negotiator with the EU in 1998. A decade later, Vassiliou headed a Greek Cypriot team negotiating EU matters during reunification talks. He remained politically active, founding a party of his own and being elected to the Cypriot legislature in 1996.
He authored several books on EU issues and Cypriot politics; was a member of several international bodies, including the Shimon Peres Institute of Peace; and received honors and decorations from countries such as France, Italy, Austria, Portugal and Egypt.
Apart from his wife, Vassiliou is also survived by two daughters and a son.
FILE -Democratic Presidential Candidate Bill Clinton, left, meets with President George Vassiliou of Cyprus at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel, Aug. 9, 1992. (AP Photo/Mario Cabrera, File)
FILE -Cyprus President George Vassiliou, left, smiles as his son Evelthon, 17, is introduced to the daughter of Massachusetts Governor and Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis, Kara, 19, at the Statehouse in Boston on Aug. 3, 1988 as Dukakis, second from right looks on, during a visit by the Cyprus President to Boston. (AP Photo/Carol Francavilla, File)
