NHL
Mikko Rantanen skates with the puck against the Winnipeg Jets in a game this month. Cameron Bartlett / Getty Images
Who won or lost in the Mikko Rantanen saga may not be known for years, but this week will provide a snapshot of how the Carolina Hurricanes, Dallas Stars and Colorado Avalanche came out of the pair of blockbuster trades that defined a trio of Stanley Cup contenders.
Nine months ago on Friday, the Hurricanes and Avalanche stunned the NHL by swinging a three-team trade that brought Rantanen and Taylor Hall to Carolina and shipped Martin Necas, Jack Drury and second- and fourth-round picks to Colorado. The Chicago Blackhawks got back a third-round pick.
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Carolina failed in its efforts to sign Rantanen to a long-term extension, and six weeks after acquiring him, the Hurricanes flipped the star winger to Dallas in a deadline deal that netted Logan Stankoven, two first-round picks and two third-round picks.
The aftermath? Three contenders with reshaped but potent lineups, all capable of being the last team standing eight months from now.
“We gave up two players who we liked a lot, and that’s not easy to do,” Hurricanes GM Eric Tulsky said Wednesday. “But in the end, we got back two players who we think fit our needs really well, plus draft picks and cap space that we could use for further additions to the roster. I think that put us in a good position for this year and going forward.”
And the Hurricanes will get a look at both of their fellow favorites — and, for the first time, their former players — in the next few days.
Carolina will face the Avalanche on Thursday in a matchup that will feature throwback uniforms — the visiting Hurricanes will be in Whalers gear, while the home team will sport Nordiques kits — and a pregame ceremony for Brent Burns, who spent the last three years in Raleigh before signing with the Avs this summer, and who recently played in his 1,500th regular-season game.
Necas, set to be an unrestricted free agent after the season, is off to a hot start, with five goals and 11 points in 21-plus minutes per game during Colorado’s 5-0-2 start. He had 28 points in 30 games after the trade last season.
Those are good numbers but represent a dip in all-situations points per 60 compared to what Necas did last season with Carolina (3.7 last season with the Hurricanes compared to 2.4 last year and 4.5 in a smaller sample through seven games in 2025-26).
Carolina fans are familiar with Necas’ ability to get hot. Last season, he had 37 points in the season’s first 24 games before cooling off — he had 18 points in his last 25 games in Raleigh. His ability to consistently produce will go a long way in determining if the Avs will pony up a giant contract to keep him — and how the trade is perceived down the road.
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Drury has a goal and an assist in just over 14 minutes a night after registering five goals and nine points in the 33 games after the trade last season. He remains great on faceoffs, winning more than 56 percent since going to Denver, and has a slightly elevated role with the Avs this season compared to usually serving as a fourth-line center in previous years.
In Colorado’s first-round loss to the Stars — more on this from the Dallas perspective in a minute, of course — both Necas and Drury had strong underlying numbers but managed just a goal each.
Carolina wraps up its road trip in Dallas on Saturday. Rantanen has already become the Stars’ best forward. He had five goals and 18 points in 20 games after the trade to Dallas — compared to two goals and six points in 13 games with the Hurricanes — and is better than a point-per-game player early in this season. The Stars have started the year 3-3-0.
But it’s what Rantanen did in last season’s playoffs — particularly against the team that drafted him No. 10 in 2015 — that solidified him as a member of the Stars.
Rantanen essentially single-handedly eliminated the Avalanche, totaling five goals and 11 points in the series’ final three games. He carried that over into the second round, scoring a hat trick in Game 1 against the Jets and putting up three more points in Game 3.
But while Dallas eliminated Winnipeg in six games, Rantanen didn’t score in his final eight playoff games. He had one assist in the last three games of the Jets series and then three more in the Oilers’ gentleman’s sweep of the Stars.
Still, Dallas probably never gets out of Round 1 without Rantanen, and his $96 million contract already looks like a bargain given the exploding salary cap.
While the Hurricanes are most likely happy that none of the three players traded away last year are terrorizing them in the Eastern Conference, Tulsky said shipping Rantanen, Necas and Drury out west wasn’t much of a consideration in making the deals.
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“We’re always focused on what’s best for our own team,” he said. “It is already sometimes a challenge to find opportunities to make the team better, and we don’t want to add additional barriers by crossing possible trade partners off the list.”
Which brings us to Carolina’s haul in the trade triangle. It’s not uncommon to hear people proclaim that the team that receives the best player wins the trade. By that line of thinking, the teams that got Rantanen in each swap were the winners.
The aftermath of these two trades is a little more complicated.
To start, Stankoven has been a great fit with the Hurricanes, so much so that the team signed him to an eight-year, $48 million extension that will kick in starting next season.
That’s exactly half the amount Rantanen got from the Stars, and the cap space and assets Carolina received in the trade allowed Tulsky to deal for K’Andre Miller and give him an eight-year, $60 million extension. The assets used in that trade with the Rangers, outside of prospect Scott Morrow, were picks — a first-rounder and a second-rounder — the Hurricanes could afford to trade because of the return on the Rantanen deal.
Stankoven had five goals and nine points in 19 games last season, and through six games this year, he has a goal and three points after making the shift to center.
He showed his worth in last season’s playoffs, scoring five goals — including two game-winners — with eight points in 15 games as Carolina reached the Eastern Conference final.
While his numbers so far this year don’t jump off the page, Stankoven has some of the best underlying numbers of any forward in the league this season. His 63.53 percent on-ice Corsi For percentage is fourth among NHL forwards with at least 50 five-on-five minutes entering Wednesday’s games, and he ranks in the top 10 in expected goal percentage and scoring chance percentage, as well as 18th in high-danger chance percentage.
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That is to say, more points are likely coming.
The other piece is Hall, the former Hart Trophy winner who got a three-year deal with a $3.16 million cap hit to stay in Raleigh. He had 18 points in 31 games after the trade from Chicago and is on a similar pace so far this season, with two goals and four points in six games.
His analytics nearly mirror Stankoven’s — not surprising since the two have played the last handful of games on the same line with Jackson Blake. In the playoffs, he had a pair of goals and six points in 15 games.
So how does one untangle the winners and losers of a sequence of events that altered the landscape of the top of the NHL?
All three teams are in their window to win, and in Rantanen, the Stars have the biggest piece that could put them over the top and bring the Stanley Cup to Dallas. But they are also against the cap ceiling and have traded away four of their nine picks in the first three rounds over the next three years, including two firsts. That limits the Stars’ ability to make additions this season without also subtracting from their lineup.
Also, Jason Robertson and Thomas Harley are due new deals after the season, and both figure to be big-ticket contracts that even a rising cap can’t fully absorb in the short term.
The key for Colorado will be getting Necas to live up to his potential and re-signing him to a deal that works for both sides. Much of the Avalanche’s core is locked up, but they too are tight to the cap — the team is currently using long-term injured reserve to stay compliant — and have dwindling assets. The Avs are already without their picks in the first three rounds next year and have the league’s worst prospect pipeline.
The Hurricanes are hoping Stankoven can be their long-desired second-line center, but he should be at least a valuable support player regardless of how that experiment fares. Hall, like Drury in Colorado, is a nice veteran glue player. But Carolina’s biggest positive is the ammunition they have from the trades to get better.
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Tulsky already did it once by using his surplus picks to land Miller, and despite not extending Rantanen — while disappointing for a franchise thirsting for a star — the signing of Nikolaj Ehlers in the offseason softens the blow.
Carolina is flush with cap space — more than $10 million at the moment with its core mostly locked up — and owns four first-round picks in the next three years. The Hurricanes are also in the best position prospect-wise, ranking No. 18 in Corey Pronman’s list compared to Dallas’ No. 23 and Colorado’s No. 32.
In a wildly competitive industry, are the best trades the ones that work out for everyone?
“Trades only happen when both sides believe the trade will help them,” Tulsky said. “So I believe in trying to understand what the other side needs and thinking about how we can provide that while still getting back what we need.
“But once we get a deal closed, I can’t say that I worry very much about how it plays out from there for the other team.”
You can bet, however, that Tulsky, Dallas GM Jim Nill or Colorado GM Chris MacFarland will be gritting their teeth if the player they traded away is lifting the Stanley Cup in June. And in the end, that will be the ultimate judge of which team came out on top.
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Cory Lavalette is a freelance writer covering the Carolina Hurricanes. He is senior editor for North State Journal, a statewide newspaper based in Raleigh covering North Carolina, and has written about the Hurricanes for several outlets since 2008. He is a graduate of Utica College (now Utica University) and has lived in the Triangle since 2000.
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