Carolina's remarkable Mikko Rantanen pivot

Flexibility is a virtue, one more NHL teams should exercise

Mikko Rantanen is the best player to change teams at today’s NHL trade deadline. He’s topped 100 points in each of the last two seasons. The Dallas Stars, his new team, did exactly what contenders are supposed to do: they went out and got the best player available. They also signed him to a long-term contract, one which will improve their odds of winning the Stanley Cup not just this year, but for many to come.

It’s easy to like what the Stars did. Teams should prioritize elite players, they should prioritize winning championships, and they should do so in a way that shows regard for the future. Dallas checks all three boxes.

It’s harder to like what Carolina did. Just six weeks ago, the Hurricanes paid a heavy price to add Rantanen. Instead of staying the course, they flipped him to the Stars for (mostly) futures. This weakens Carolina’s chances of winning this year, and plays into a long-term trend with this team: always good, but never quite good enough to win it all. It’s no wonder they’re taking flak.

Despite the criticism, the Hurricanes did the right thing. They were right to acquire Rantanen, and they were right to send him away. They would have been right to make both moves, even if the sum total was a negative for the franchise — which it wasn’t.

Let’s look at the three phases of the Rantanen pivot, starting with the initial plan.

(Note: Carolina also got the rights to unsigned prospect Nils Juntorp, whose current trajectory strongly suggests that he’ll remain unsigned.)

First, some important context: the Hurricanes have won at least one playoff round in each of the last six seasons, which is great. They haven’t won a game after the second round, which isn’t great. Their postseason offence has been one-dimensional, as a look at their scoring leaders shows:

1. Sebastian Aho: 74 games, 70 points

2. Teuvo Teravainen: 65 games, 39 points

Andrei Svechnikov and Seth Jarvis are young and improving, so their full impact doesn’t register here, but even so Carolina hasn’t had the necessary firepower to win. Rantanen, who has 97 playoff points over this span, would help a lot.

Rantanen solves a critical problem for Carolina, so the only other issue here is return. With due respect to Taylor Hall, Jack Drury and the draft picks, this boils down to Rantanen vs. Martin Necas, and two key differences between them: contract status and relative quality.

On the contract side, Rantanen is a pending free agent, which brings the risk of him walking for nothing. Yet Necas is bound for unrestricted free agency in the summer of 2026, meaning that Carolina is really only moving that risk forward by a single year.

It’s also reasonable at this point to think a Rantanen extension is more likely than a Necas extension. Necas (like Drury) opted for salary arbitration in 2024. Carolina managed to avoid that, but instead of a long-term deal (the Hurricanes offered eight years) they only agreed to a two-year term that walked the player to the open market. Rantanen, meanwhile, is joining a contender with a strong Finnish contingent; he might be more willing to stay for the long haul.

The quality gap is bigger than it might initially seem, too. There are a lot of ways to illustrate this — Rantanen’s two-way reputation exceeds that of Necas — but for simplicity’s sake we’ll just look at scoring.

Forwards who can score 100 points are rare. Between 2021-24, just 17 forwards managed it. Rantanen is one of eight to have done it twice, and at the time of the trade to Carolina he was on pace to do it a third straight time.

Necas, at the time of the trade, is on pace for 92 points, 21 better than his previous career high of 71. The most generous interpretation is that he’s a 90-point guy, so let’s go with that. In the same three-year span, thirty forwards have scored 90 points at least once. If we instead take the average of his pace and his previous best season, and call him an 80-point guy, he’s one of 50 players to manage it.

Most fans look at a 90-point season and a 100-point season and see a marginal difference. That’s not actually how it works: 100-point seasons are twice as rare as 90-point seasons. If Necas is a 90-point guy, he’s still twice as common as a 100-point guy.

Put simply: Carolina isn’t looking to make a minor upgrade; it’s looking at a major one. It’s taking on a bit of immediate contract risk, but less than one might think. Most critically, it’s making the deal early enough that it has six weeks to deal with that risk.

Those six weeks are the second phase of the pivot, and are where the situation and circumstances change.

Rantanen was not an immediate success in Carolina. He had just six points in 13 games, and the Hurricanes lost seven times. It would be silly to put too much emphasis on that. Rantanen spent a decade with Colorado (his only NHL team before the trade), won a Stanley Cup there in 2022, and had the whirlwind of the 4 Nations tournament thrown in for good measure.

The critical item wasn’t Rantanen’s performance in a brief span under difficult circumstances. It was Carolina’s inability to sign him. Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman reported an eight-year, nine-figure offer. The plan was clearly to lock up a great player for a long time and compete for multiple titles.

The plan failed, leaving the Hurricanes with two options.

They could hold on to the player, hoping to win this year and/or convince him to sign. The problem is the massive downside risk: not winning (always the most likely outcome) and watching the player walk away in the aftermath (which, given Rantanen’s inability to commit before the deadline is clearly the likely outcome.)

This is the traditional approach, and conventional wisdom. Stay the course, hope for the best.

The other thing Carolina could do was flip the player. His rental value was as high as ever, given that rentals are rented for the playoffs, not for February. More than that, Carolina was the only team in the league able to negotiate an eight-year deal with Rantanen, meaning that if he wanted the maximum payout he had incentive to work with them.

That’s exactly what happened:

In terms of asset value, it’s impossible to argue with what Carolina did here. Two firsts and two thirds are a significantly better draft pick haul than the second, third and fourth the Hurricanes gave up in the initial deal.

Stankoven, meanwhile, stands a good chance of evolving into a Necas comparable. Through their age-21 seasons, their scoring is practically identical.

Moreover, as good as Carolina is now, the Hurricanes core is still shockingly young and under long-term control. Aho is 27 and Jarvis 23; both are signed until 2032. Svechnikov is 24 and signed through 2029. Jaccob Slavin is 30, but he’s signed through 2033 and promises to hold his value.

To that group, we can now add Stankoven, who is under team control until 2030. Blue-chipper Alexander Nikishin (23) is generally considered the best player currently outside the NHL and hasn’t even started his major-league clock yet.

That window matters. Looking at what they have — and especially considering how good all those long-term contracts are going to look as the NHL salary cap increases — it would be ridiculous for the Hurricanes to indulge in a reckless roll of the dice. Most teams five years into contending for a title have a barren prospect cupboard, few draft picks, and an aging core. Carolina, somehow, has a rich prospect cupboard, lots of picks, and a core that’s likely to be better next season than it is this season.

Again, this wasn’t the plan. When Rantanen became available, Carolina made the optimal decision: going out and getting a great player in the hopes of getting much better immediately and then staying good by signing him long-term. When that became unworkable, the ‘Canes sensibly pivoted to being as good as possible for as long as possible.

Or, as John Maynard Keynes put it:

The inactive investor who takes up an obstinate attitude about his holdings and refuses to change his opinion merely because facts and circumstances have changed is the one who in the long run comes to grievous loss.

When circumstances change, plans should change too. The Hurricanes should be applauded for their flexibility.