The Mikko Rantanen Era lasted 42 days. The Hurricanes can still relegate it to a footnote

Luke DeCock, The News & Observer on Mar 8, 2025

Published in Hockey

By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here

Seven years after Tom Dundon bought the Carolina Hurricanes, he finally made the big trade for a legitimate superstar he’d been trying to make from Day 1.

The Mikko Rantanen Era in Hurricanes history lasted 42 days.

Longer than the Patrick Marleau Era, but hardly any more accomplished.

Even if the Hurricanes went into Thursday night’s game against the Boston Bruins leaving the door open to keeping Rantanen past Friday’s trade deadline in hopes they could convince him to sign a contract extension in June, his dismal performance in the 3-2 win made his continued employment impossible.

So off Rantanen went Friday morning, flipped to the Dallas Stars for young waterbug winger Logan Stankoven and a pair of first-round picks the Hurricanes were unable to exchange for immediate help by the 3 p.m. deadline. The Stars first agreed with Rantanen on an eight-year deal for less than the Hurricanes had offered him.

“I don’t want to speak for the player, but my sense of it from where I was sitting is, this just didn’t feel like home to him,” Hurricanes general manager Eric Tulsky said Friday.

In the end, it was the best the Hurricanes could do.

Take what you can and move on.

That’s how that one went.

They ended up with Stankoven and Taylor Hall and a couple first-round picks they can swap for help in the future, but not the superstar they so badly wanted and thought they finally had.

Something went haywire somewhere. When the Hurricanes traded Martin Necas and Jack Drury to the Colorado Avalanche for Rantanen, they insisted money would not be an issue the way it had been in Colorado, where Nathan MacKinnon and Cale Makar were the top dogs. They met his demands immediately. No nickel-and-diming on this one.

But Rantanen was so shockingly ineffective in his time with the Hurricanes — banging them in on a torrid 13-goal pace when he wasn’t falling down on the ice — his departure now becomes addition by subtraction. It would not be surprising in the least to see the Hurricanes rip off a bunch of wins now, with this will-he-or-won’t-he drama excised from their room like a malignant growth.

Why Rantanen wasn’t a fit here is a complex and nuanced discussion far beyond the mental acumen of most hockey influencers, with blame on both sides.

Comparisons will inevitably be drawn to Jake Guentzel, another goal-scoring winger who failed to score goals in Carolina and declined to re-sign, and while that’s a lazy narrative, there are a few similarities. Neither, for example, seemed to be as useful without a future Hall of Fame center on their line.

There’s also a valid question to be asked whether the Hurricanes’ shot-volume philosophy and hard-driving style is capable of making the most of a superstar winger. (Does that, for example, account for Andrei Svechnikov’s stalled progression?) Rantanen played less here than he did in Colorado and was certainly less productive.

The similarities end there. Guentzel was a rental from the beginning, and while the Hurricanes tried to fit him into their salary structure, they ended up spending that money wisely on several players over the rest of the offseason.

But they genuinely thought Rantanen was going to be a foundation piece, ready to make an eight-year commitment, and they clearly had some reason to believe the feeling was at least a little mutual, even if that turned out to be false.

“We knew it was a risk,” Tulsky said. “The upside if he did sign was big. It’s hard to acquire players like this. And when you do, if you can get them locked up, that’s a big value to the franchise. The upside is worth chasing.”

In Rantanen’s defense, the circumstances weren’t great, with the Hurricanes on the road and dealing with an epidemic in the dressing room when he arrived, and the 4 Nations interrupting his acclimatization. It’s tough to commit a decade of your life to a place you barely know.

On the ice, systems and style aside, he didn’t have a right-shot center on his line, let alone a star like MacKinnon, and the Hurricanes’ power play was already struggling before their best entry guy, Necas, was shipped out in the Rantanen deal. The situation demanded a lot of adjustments from a player who was rarely asked to make any in Colorado.

But this is professional hockey, and trades are part of the game. If Rantanen wasn’t going to put on his big-boy pants and deal with it, he was never going to be a fit here anyway. His no-show Thursday night made it easy. Good riddance. Let him go somewhere he wants to be. Maybe the Hurricanes actually dodged a bullet, unlikely as it may seem based on the larger arc of his career.

Either way, there’s a lot of hockey left. If the players left in Carolina are as good as they claim to be, they have the opportunity to show him what he couldn’t see for himself.

They can still relegate the Rantanen Era, as brief and unimpressive as it was, to a footnote.

_____