Grading the Mikko Rantanen trade: Hurricanes go all-in, Avalanche extend window in all-time blockbuster
On Friday night the hockey world came to a grinding halt, and not because of anything going on during an unusually robust four-game slate of games.
The Carolina Hurricanes, Chicago Blackhawks, and Colorado Avalanche pulled the trigger on a trade that will send Mikko Rantanen, a back-to-back 100-point scorer and one of the best players on the planet, to Carolina.
We have a blockbuster brewing between the Hurricanes, Avalanche, and Blackhawks 👀 pic.twitter.com/fXQw0li63l
— Daily Faceoff (@DailyFaceoff) January 25, 2025The deal is a jaw-dropper. In the salary cap era, a guy like Jake Guentzel is in the upper echelon of players who move midseason, and even his trade to Carolina last season only materialized after his Penguins had already fallen out of contention.
With all due respect to Guentzel, he’s not Rantanen. The Finn is an absolute beast operating at the peak of his powers, and he hadn’t publicly asked out of Colorado.
This is a category 5, magnitude 9.0 blockbuster, and it warrants an especially urgent edition of Daily Faceoff’s trade grades.
Carolina Hurricanes
Receive:
RW Mikko Rantanen, $4.625 million cap hit (after 50% of salary retained by CHI) through 2025
LW Taylor Hall, $6 million cap hit through 2025
Auston Matthews. Leon Draisaitl. David Pastrnak. Connor McDavid. That is the list, in its entirety, of players who have scored more goals than Mikko Rantanen since 2022.
Rantanen averages 38 goals and 90 points per 82 games for his entire career, a pace he’s set to top for the fourth consecutive season. He is one of four active players, along with Draisaitl, McDavid, and Pastrnak, to record both a 55-goal season and a 62-assist season, and has 101 points in 81 career playoff games.
All this is to say Rantanen is a special, special player who seems to add to his arsenal with each passing year.
If the pending UFA is a rental, he’s the best rental to change hands in recent history. If the Hurricanes re-sign Rantanen this summer, they’ve brought in a winger who keeps company with the likes of Kucherov, Kaprizov, and Pastrnak at relatively little cost; neither of their two untouchables, Sebastian Aho and Seth Jarvis, went the other way.
For a perennial contender that has long lamented its lack of Hart Trophy-level talent, that makes this trade a 480-foot home run for Carolina even before Hall enters the mix.
He might be well removed from his MVP best, but the 33-year-old should have no trouble cracking the top nine for a Canes lineup that prominently features journeymen Eric Robinson and Jack Roslovic on the flanks.
In the end, a Stanley Cup moonshot only cost rookie GM Eric Tulsky a handful of day-two draft picks, a depth center, and a top-six winger in Martin Necas who asked for a trade out of Raleigh just last summer.
Grade: A++
Chicago Blackhawks
Receive:
$4.625 million cap hit through 2025 (Rantanen)
2025 3rd round pick (Chicago)
For who? For what? Why did Chicago Blackhawks’ GM Kyle Davidson strain to get this trade over the line?
Davidson spent a cap retention slot to help the Hurricanes chase a Stanley Cup with Rantanen. He could have used it to halve Hall’s salary and get a better pick from someone else in a month.
Instead, the Blackhawks rushed the veteran winger out of town without attempting to beef up his value before the March deadline.
It’s not as though Hall was some locker room cancer that had to go ASAP; for some masochistic reason, he actually liked playing for the wretched Hawks. Nor is he washed up. Averaging over .5 points per game without significant time on Connor Bedard’s line is nothing to sneeze at in Chicago.
The Hurricanes got both players they wanted. Davidson made that possible, and all he has to show for it is a third-rounder he sent to Carolina at last year’s draft.
Way to make ‘em work for it!
Grade: F
Colorado Avalanche
Receive:
RW Martin Necas, $6.5 million through 2026
C Jack Drury, $1.75 million through 2026
2025 second-round pick
2026 fourth-round pick
This had to happen for the Avalanche to compete in 2026 and beyond.
Rantanen will make more than Nathan MacKinnon’s $ 12.5 million AAV on his next deal. That deal will still be in effect when Cale Makar comes due for an extension, and it will still be in effect whenever captain Gabriel Landeskog and his $7 million salary are finally ready to emerge from an LTIR stint approaching the three-year mark.
Colorado already committed over $4 million in cap space to extensions for Mackenzie Blackwood and Logan O’Connor earlier this season. It wouldn’t be surprising if MacKinnon’s buddy Jonathan Drouin is next in line.
Joe Sakic and Chris MacFarland want as much cost certainty as they can fit under the rising cap, which is exactly why depth guys like O’Connor and Miles Wood are signed from here to eternity.
A Brinks truck with Rantanen’s name on it would defeat the purpose of those deals, which is to keep a relatively stable core of players around MacKinnon and Makar for as long as they’re in their primes. It was either MacKinnon, Makar, and friends or MacKinnon, Makar, Rantanen, and the ECHLers.
MacFarland knew that, and he took his medicine before it was too late. Now, the third member of the band is gone, and in his place is Marty “Shemp Howard” Necas, a speedy, slick forward whose impressive eye test is finally translating to the stat sheet (55 P in 49 GP).
The Avs are probably buying high on the 26-year-old Czech, a 50-60 point tease for most of his career, but if their trade demands came to include Jarvis or Andrei Svechnikov, negotiations might have dragged on long enough to leak to the public. You can ask the Vancouver Canucks what that does to morale.
So often, fans rail against losing pending UFAs “for nothing.” 99 times out of 100, a contending team will take its chances in the playoffs and do just that.
The Avs deserve credit for getting a nice top-six player and a handful of futures for a guy, no matter how talented, who would have been gone in six months anyway. Their 2025 Cup chances worsened in the past 24 hours, though, and that stings.
Grade: B-
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