PHILADELPHIA — Ask around the Carolina Hurricanes, and you’ll glean that Jordan Staal is a busy man.

Captain, conscience, tone-setter, the defensive backbone for the forward group, an on-ice extension of his coach — those are all part of the gig. Seeing him succeed in those spaces is nothing new. He’s been an NHL player for 20 seasons, somehow, and a Hurricane for 14.

Power-play weapon? These days, not so much. He’s 37 now, insulated by a growing list of younger, more offensively dynamic teammates, which has made his primary man-advantage responsibilities winning the faceoff, then making his way to the bench. Usually. Not always.

And not on Thursday night. With 3:25 remaining in the first period, against a Philadelphia Flyers team that was looking less overwhelmed by the minute, Staal took the ice for a power play and stayed there. Fifty-two seconds later, he’d put the Hurricanes ahead to escape the first period with a 1-0 lead. Staal planted himself at the net front, used his wingspan to corral a rebound of Andrei Svechnikov’s shot off the back boards and swept the puck past Flyers goalie Dan Vladar.

A handful of seconds before that, Staal helped set up the sequence by making some helpful contact with Flyers center Christian Dvorak behind the net. In the regular season, that might count as interference. In the playoffs, it might never — and Staal was playing in his 164th career postseason game. You can trust that he was aware of the circumstances.

“We always look at the scoresheet to judge people, for the most part, but that’s not how it impacts us on a nightly basis,” Carolina coach Rod Brind’Amour said after Carolina finished off a 4-1 win, earning a chance on Saturday night to sweep a second straight opponent.

“Staal does sometimes. (On Friday) he did. But he does everything for this team. It’s nice that he gets on the scoresheet and we can talk about him, but it’s pretty much every night.”

For Brind’Amour, it’s been every night of his head coaching career. He started as an assistant with the Hurricanes in 2011, the year before Carolina acquired Staal from the Pittsburgh Penguins. Since then, Staal has put up two 20-goal seasons (separated by 10 years) and been a Selke finalist (14 seasons after the first time he accomplished that with Pittsburgh).

Throughout, he’s earned his reputation as a player who sets the culture, the template and the tone for an organization that, perhaps more than any other in the league, relies on culture, template and tone. At the moment, he’s the foundational piece for a team that’s 7-0 in the playoffs and better equipped than ever at finding its proof of concept. The Hurricanes are 7/16 of the way to a Stanley Cup, and the build began with Staal, a player equipped — physically and mentally — to do exactly what Brind’Amour asks of him, and to pass that expectation down the roster.

“Trains hard, plays hard, does everything he can to make sure he is a pro and doing things the right way every second of the day,” general manager Eric Tulsky told The Athletic. “That has allowed him to extend his career and continue to perform at a high level and continue to be a player who (Brind’Amour) can put out against the other team’s best and trust that he will be able to handle those minutes.

“He’s still the defensive anchor for our forward group. When Rod is setting matchups, one of the things he starts with is, ‘Where do we want to put Jordan?’ He continues to play that role for us.”

He plays other roles, too; when Brind’Amour decided that he needed to get 32-goal winger Seth Jarvis going in Game 2, he moved him off the top line with Sebastian Aho and Andrei Svechnikov, where he’d spent virtually the entire regular season, back to a line with Staal. The two spent 711 largely successful minutes on the ice together from 2022-25 — and then a handful of extremely successful seconds together Wednesday night. Jarvis scored on his first shift back with Staal as his center. “Seems if I jump with Jordo,” Jarvis said, “stuff starts to go in.”

Jalen Chatfield could say the same; on Friday, with the game tied 1-1 and the Hurricanes shorthanded, Chatfield scored a 2-on-1 goal on a backhand feed from Staal, who’d started the rush after teammate Jordan Martinook knocked the puck away from Flyers defenseman Jamie Drysdale.

“Since I’ve been here, since Day 1,” Chatfield said, “he’s been a great leader.”

Staal was self-deprecating about the pass, which nearly went through Trevor Zegras’ legs, saying he “didn’t know what (he) was doing.”

Martinook, a staple on Staal’s line for years, seemed to disagree. “It’s just a pleasure to watch him. Obviously, I’ve been riding shotgun for a few years now, and to see the impact that he can have on games is pretty special,” Martinook said. “And I feel like he’s just getting better with the older he gets, which is fun to see. He prepares better than anybody, wants it more than anyone.”

Martinook, by the way, was the one who said Staal “sets the tone.” Asked what he might mean, Staal redirected a bit, calling it “the game that we’ve built as a whole and, obviously I’m part of it.”

After a pause, though, the answer came through.

“It’s being physical,” he said. “It’s making it hard on them and playing in their end, and just doing that over and over and over again until they break.”

On Thursday, the Flyers broke. And on Saturday, the Hurricanes will have a chance to break them one more time.