So much to unpack, eh?
The hockey world is still absolutely buzzing Saturday after Friday night’s blockbuster.
Players of Mikko Rantanen’s status just don’t get traded very often, especially in-season. And a little like Joe Thornton almost 20 years ago, there was so little evidence of Rantanen even being in play. More on that later.
So, how did we get here?
It starts with a contract negotiation that just couldn’t find momentum. Some high-profile pending UFAs instruct their agents to pause talks in-season, but that wasn’t the case with Rantanen. His agent, Andy Scott from Octagon, continued to have on-again, off-again discussions with the Colorado Avalanche dating back to last summer. And in fact, both sides had more talks this past week.
But in the end, there was a Nathan MacKinnon internal cap that presented a hurdle in talks, and the gap between the sides was big enough that the Avs thought they risked losing him for nothing July 1. And they couldn’t stomach the thought of that.
My understanding is that Rantanen was willing to take less than what a July 1 market number looked like to stay in Colorado, but even so, his number was not in the same realm as where the Avs were.
Meaning, I don’t think Rantanen was stuck at $14 million a year. He would have taken less to stay in Denver. But I would imagine being around even the $12.6 million MacKinnon average annual value might have been seen as too much by the Avs.
Whatever the case, Rantanen is now a Hurricane. They’ve got five-plus months to extend him.
GO DEEPER
Will Mikko Rantanen re-sign with the Hurricanes? Projecting his next contract
The key for Carolina is that it can go eight years with the 28-year-old Rantanen. No other team will be able to do that July 1. The total money over eight years is an important factor.
And I would venture to guess that the Canes will try to persuade Rantanen and his camp to do a deferred-payment contract since they already did it with Seth Jarvis and Jaccob Slavin. But I would also caution that the Oilers presented that deferred-payment idea during their extension talks on Leon Draisaitl last summer, and the same agent, Andy Scott, wasn’t interested in doing it in that case.
We’ll see what Canes general manager Eric Tulsky can negotiate. He certainly showed his moxie in this blockbuster trade.
Tulsky was thrown into the fire last offseason after taking over as GM for the departed Don Waddell. He had a short runway to get pending unrestricted free agent Jake Guentzel re-signed. There were probably some valuable lessons in that exercise for a first-time GM like Tulsky. The Canes ended up getting to the number that Guentzel’s camp more or less wanted, but it took so long that July 1 was days away and it was too hard for Guentzel to resist talking to other teams. And, well, we know how that ended: with Guentzel’s rights traded to the Tampa Bay Lightning during the draft.
My point is that Carolina will want to put its best foot forward and not risk getting too close to July 1 with Rantanen. I can assure you Rantanen’s ask on the market July 1 is $14 million plus, with the emphasis on the plus. But of course that would be on a seven-year deal.
Rantanen and Sebastian Aho being very close friends will play a part in Carolina trying to persuade the pending UFA to stay. But in the end, Rantanen will have a business decision to make.
As an aside, Guentzel’s agent is Ben Hankinson, who works for the same firm, Octagon, as Rantanen’s. The smart firms all share notes on how these negotiations play out. So Rantanen’s agent knows exactly how it went down with Carolina and Guentzel. That doesn’t mean Carolina can’t be successful in signing Rantanen, but it’s just more information to file away nonetheless.
And hey, if Carolina wins the Stanley Cup but still can’t sign Rantanen, who cares? It will have absolutely been worth it to finally get over the playoff hump.
On top of all that, Carolina as an organization views cap space as an opportunity, not a scary thing. So the plan is to extend Rantanen, but if they can’t, the idea would be to be aggressive with that cap space in another fashion this summer. It was all taken into account as far as the risk of taking on Rantanen potentially only as a rental.
I know there was talk about whether Jesperi Kotkaniemi could have been part of this blockbuster, but I’m told his name actually wasn’t part of this specific trade negotiation with Colorado. I suspect the reason his name was out there was actually because the Vancouver Canucks had brought up his name in trade talks with Carolina. (More on that in a moment.) The Avs wanted Jack Drury, and his upside was part of the trade along with the talented Martin Necas, of course.
It’s the price to pay if you’re Carolina for the chance to have a superstar like Rantanen.
Of note, several NHL front offices I chatted with in the aftermath of the blockbuster had no idea Rantanen was available. But it’s not accurate to say Colorado only dealt with one team on it. League sources confirmed Saturday that the Avs did reach out to a very small number of teams and carefully suggested if they got to the point where they felt they couldn’t sign him, that perhaps that team would get a call and they should be ready for that. I think it was a very, very small list of teams. In part because Rantanen had a partial no-trade list.
Where this leaves the Canucks is a whole other story, of course. As I reported late Friday night, it’s my understanding that Carolina and Vancouver got close on a deal this past week. What I can’t confirm is whether it involved J.T. Miller or Elias Pettersson because the reality is that the Canes had talks with the Canucks over the past several weeks on each player. All I know is that Miller wasn’t asked to waive his full no-move clause.
We also know that Carolina tried to trade for Pettersson a year ago before he extended with the Canucks. I can confirm that Vancouver had talks with other teams as recently as this past week regarding Pettersson, as well. So it remains as it ever was. The Canucks could trade either Miller or Pettersson and perhaps even both when all is said and done between now and next season.
Whatever the case is, Vancouver lost a trading partner once Carolina went the Colorado route.
Whether this re-opens the door for the New York Rangers to take a third crack at it on Miller, we shall see. The New Jersey Devils have dabbled on Miller, but my sense as of Saturday is they just don’t see how it all fits, cap-wise and asset-wise. That could change closer to March 7 when the salary cap circumstances change. There are a handful of other teams that have talked to Vancouver on Miller, as well.
As for the Chicago Blackhawks end of things, I know they have taken some criticism for getting only a third-round pick for their part in the deal. This is how I would break it down: There was a very limited market for Taylor Hall. There just wasn’t much interest. The idea all along for Chicago was that it would try to move him before the deadline and that they’d be willing to retain salary and get a third-round pick out of it. But the Hawks were getting very little traction on Hall. So when Carolina called with interest on Hall but with the caveat that it might be up to something bigger and asked if Chicago would be willing to retain on another player instead, Chicago viewed it as getting the asset they wanted for Hall anyway and taking up only one of their salary retention spots.
The Hawks have one salary retention spot left to use at the deadline now.
But what was interesting from a Hawks’ perspective is that for a while Friday all they knew was that Hall was ending up in Carolina as part of a three-team deal and that they were retaining on a pending UFA from a third team. They didn’t know it was Rantanen until the last moment.
And by the way, Carolina was one of the 10 teams on Hall’s no-trade list, so he actually had to sign off on his no-trade clause to allow the trade to happen. That was a no-brainer for Hall, who goes from playing on the fourth line on last-place Chicago to having a chance to win a Stanley Cup in Carolina.
(Photo: Matthew Stockman / Getty Images)
