Hurricanes GM Tulsky on Rantanen trade saga: ‘We knew it was a risk’
Hurricanes GM Eric Tulsky said he didn’t regret swinging big to bring in Mikko Rantanen, even if it didn’t end how the club had envisioned.
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It’s been a whirlwind seven weeks for the Carolina Hurricanes brass.
In late January, the Canes left the rest of the league stunned, coming up with an out-of-the-blue, three-team blockbuster that sent long-time Colorado Avalanche stalwart Mikko Rantanen to Raleigh, as well as Chicago’s Taylor Hall. It seemed a coup for the ever-contending Canes, and a massive miscalculation for Colorado, the team that had seen Rantanen play out the first decade of his big-league career, become an all-world talent, and lift the Stanley Cup in 2022.
A month and change later, Rantanen is gone, the Canes having to trade the star winger to Dallas ahead of Friday’s deadline, after failing to ink the pending free agent to a long-term extension.
In all, between the two deals, the Canes moved out forwards Martin Necas and Jack Drury — as well as, eventually, Rantanen — along with a third-round pick, and ultimately brought in forward Logan Stankoven, a pair of first-round picks and a pair of third-round picks.
Speaking to the media in the wake of Friday’s trade, which brought an end to the month-long double-blockbuster saga, Canes GM Eric Tulsky said he didn’t regret swinging big to bring in Rantanen, even if it didn’t end how the club had envisioned.
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“Look, our organization is characterized by an aggressive approach,” Tulsky told reporters on Friday, after the trade deadline came and went. “Being aggressive means taking some risks. It means taking some chances. If you only make moves when you’re 100 per cent sure you know exactly how it’s going to work out, you’re going to miss some opportunities to make the team better. That’s not what we want to do. If the team was already winning Cup after Cup after Cup, maybe that would be the time to be conservative. But we haven’t gotten where we want to be yet, so we need to keep taking chances and trying to push things forward.
“We knew it was a risk. The upside, if he did sign, was big. It’s hard to acquire players like this, and when you do, if you get them locked up long-term, it’s a big value to the franchise. That upside is worth chasing. And it helps that even in the downside, where he decided not to sign, we were able to pivot and trade him and bring in a player in Logan, who I think is going to great for us, and bring in a lot of draft capital. … I’m pretty happy with where we ended up in the end.”
The club’s approach has been questioned by some among the Canes faithful, who watched their team trade away a homegrown star in Necas only to see the marquee acquisition he was moved out for eventually traded away as well. The negotiations that followed, between Rantanen and the Canes, have had the hockey world rapt for the past month, as the possibility of a second blockbuster came into focus. Upon moving to the Stars, the Nousiainen, Finland, product ended up inking an eight-year, $96-million deal with Dallas.
Tulsky shared his view of the negotiations, and why he believes Rantanen felt Carolina wasn’t the right fit.
“It’s hard for me because I don’t want to speak for the player, but my sense of it from where I was sitting was this just didn’t feel like home to him,” the GM told the gathered media Friday. “Everyone has their own personal needs. I think we have a great organization, I think we have a great coach, I think we have a great locker room — but it doesn’t fit for everyone. And it just didn’t feel like home for him, as far as I can tell.
“And that’s OK. It’s a person’s life. He’s making an eight-year commitment, and if this doesn’t feel like the right place for him, then that’s OK.”
Tulsky also pushed back on the notion that the Canes have trouble inking star players to long-term deals, after two seasons that have seen Carolina swing big at the trade deadline only to lose their star acquisition down the line — the other being Jake Guentzel, who was acquired by the club a year ago, played out the campaign, and wound up signing with Tampa Bay in the off-season.
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“The two situations are different,” Tulsky argued. “I understand why they get connected, because they were both mid-season trades that didn’t end up long-term. But my perception with Jake was he came in and it did feel like home, as far as I can tell. … As far as I know, he was happy. We were just in a cap crunch, and he is a very good player who had earned a very nice payday, and we were in a position where it was hard to make that commitment with our roster because there were so many unknowns going into last summer, and so many people hitting free agency. And it just ended up not working out, because by the time we knew what we had to spend, it was too late.
“This here’s different — we had plenty of money, and money was never going to be the issue. The issue was just, it didn’t feel like home to him.”
The other key difference, of course, is that the club held on to Guentzel through the regular season and post-season, even without the promise of a long-term extension — in the end, the club fell in the second round, and Guentzel walked. This time, the offers on the table were enough to prompt Tulsky and Co. to change course, rather than treating Rantanen as a rental.
“He’s a very good player, and having him with the team would’ve been a perfectly fine outcome. Having him for a Cup run would’ve been good — maybe we win the Cup with him. We had to weigh that against what we could get in a trade,” Tulsky said. “If the trade offers hadn’t been there, then we wouldn’t have done it. But you have to balance it.
“Of course, when you move him out, that’s a loss for the current year. But if you bring in assets that help the team going forward, and you bring in a player in Logan, who we think is going to be a really good fit for us right away, and is young enough that he’s going to keep getting better and better, it felt like we were getting enough in this deal that it was the right thing for the organization long-term.”
The Canes GM confirmed that the club did look to try to flip the two first-round picks acquired in the deal that sent Rantanen to the Stars, but said that time was against them by that point.
“It was a complicated day, because the Mikko transaction was consuming a lot of our bandwidth and, honestly, until that transaction closed, we had very little cap space. So we couldn’t execute anything until then,” Tulsky said. “At that point, there wasn’t a lot of time left, and the pieces that we had targeted most were not necessarily available.
“It would’ve been nice if we had been able to bring in another player or two, but it doesn’t always work out. …. Of course you would always like to add where you can, and keep pushing the team forward. But we have what we have, and we will make the best of it.”
