Who's to blame for RantanenGate?

The anatomy of a fumbled trade deadline, and what some talking heads keep missing...

I’m not sure I have anything to offer on Mikko RantanenGate that hasn’t already been said. But as always when it comes to the Carolina Hurricanes, otherwise smart and plugged in hockey folks are acting too weird about the whole thing for me to just sit here.

Look, I’m not going to go all the way in the other direction. I’m not going to indulge Hurricanes fans’ fantasies that this is the perfect little hockey team above criticism and beyond reproach.

I think we can all agree that trading for Mikko Rantanen then trading him away in a matter of six weeks wasn’t the plan, and isn’t a good thing. You can argue alls well that ends well, especially with the Jank and Stank World Tour off to the hottest start among trade deadline acquisitions. But this wasn’t the initial, intended outcome of trading for Rantanen.

My problem isn’t with the criticism, and the team has openly criticized itself for certain parts of this saga. GM Eric Tulsky admitted that the amount of time it took to get the Rantanen deal officially done kept them from making another move or two. Head coach Rod Brind’Amour admitted to Adam Gold that Rantanen told the Canes there were four teams he’d sign with, none of which were Carolina.

Brind’Amour took it even further in that interview: “The question is,” he said, “should we have known that before we signed him?”

Something like that can be impossible to truly know when you’re dealing with an agent doing his job and the other team trying to do its job. But you knew the Avalanche were trading their 100-point, homegrown, pending UFA because the two camps couldn’t agree on an extension.

At the very least, you shouldn’t assume the best-case scenario. This is a player allegedly blindsided by the first trade of his career, looking to exert his own personal agency at some point in a life-altering decision. Meanwhile, the salary cap is set to increase by the largest margin since before the pandemic this offseason. Even if the other side is telling you he’ll probably sign an extension, you just can’t bank on that.

So if that’s Brind’Amour’s question, here’s mine: Did it really have to be extension or bust? This one’s trickier, because I agree with longtime local reporter Cory Lavalette’s take. By the end of the six weeks Rantanen spent as a Hurricane, the damage had been done. He wasn’t fitting in, worse yet, it looked like he didn’t care to fit in. He was as checked out as they come and it was ultimately good that the Canes salvaged what they did out of it.

But what if they’d approached it differently from the jump? What if, instead of putting pressure on the player to sign an extension before March 7 or else, they’d have said: “Let’s work as hard as possible to get a Cup and see what happens later?”

I dunno. This could’ve yielded the same exact result. A source close to the situation (the one who told me the correct return that became a group chat exclusive) told me