The "Roller Coaster" Timeline of the Mikko Rantanen and Logan Stankoven Trade That Almost Didn't Happen

Little wonder that the Stars front office didn't get much sleep over the last couple days

At one point early Friday morning, it looked like Mikko Rantanen wasn’t going to be a Dallas Star at all. But in the end, Rantanen decided that Dallas was really where he wanted to be.

Here's the whole Rantanen saga, as best I've been able to cobble events together. It's a wild story of ultimatums, missed opportunities, and a superstar who never wanted to be traded in the first place. But once Colorado set this all in motion, Rantanen finally decided to join the Avs’ division rival for the better part of the next decade.

Here's how it all happened.

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Stars fans went to sleep Thursday night having heard that the Stars and Hurricanes had a blockbuster trade in place, provided Dallas could agree to an extension with Rantanen’s camp.

But when the sun came up on Friday a few hours later, things appeared to have changed. No extension had been agreed to, and Carolina was again beginning to talk with other teams.

The very idea of Carolina flipping Rantanen was almost as wild as the initial shock of the Rantanen trade from Colorado in the first place. But in the end, it was clear that Rantanen really just didn’t want to be in Carolina.

“For whatever reason, it just didn’t feel like home to him,” said Hurricanes GM Eric Tulsky after the trade. And there’s every reason to believe him, as noted insider Elliotte Friedman reported that he believes Rantanen told Carolina that it was never about the money.

Carolina didn’t have the luxury of finalizing an extension with Rantanen before they acquired him, possibly because Colorado didn’t want word to leak out to Rantanen’s camp before the trade back in January was agreed upon. But the consequence of that approach was that Rantanen was blindsided by the trade, and that may have made him less eager to immediately commit another eight years of his life to a city that he’d never even considered playing for, prior to being dumped by the only NHL team he had ever known.

“I think a lot of the guys are just shocked. It's pretty crazy someone like that getting traded. ... He's (been) a big part of our team, our culture. He's been here from the dog days, in ‘16, ’17 right up until now. It's helped grow this organization up to a Stanley Cup winner and being a contender every season, a big reason why is because of him.”

-Nathan MacKinnon, January 27 2025

Tulsky also emphasized that the Hurricanes had traded for Rantanen with only something like 75% confidence that an extension would end up happening. He contrasted that trade to the Jake Guentzel trade last year, where the team was pretty confident Guentzel was willing to stay, only for Carolina’s cap situation to make a fair deal unworkable on the team’s end, leading to Guentzel’s eventual departure for Tampa Bay in free agency.

Carolina didn’t want to risk losing an expensive rental two years in a row without something to show for it. So in this case, and especially with Rantanen not playing particularly well in Carolina’s cycle-based offense, Tulsky felt a sense of urgency to ensure they could move Rantanen for assets that would help the team in the short- and long-term, wherever those assets were.

“We looked at a lot of different things,” Tulsky said. “We didn’t want any team to feel like we had any one specific need and they didn’t have it, so they shouldn’t try to get involved.”

Jim Nill said that about two weeks earlier, Carolina had begun reaching out to teams Mikko Rantanen was interested in going to (and signing an extension with), just to gauge interest. Dallas was one of those teams.

Putting some pieces together here, I think it’s safe to say that after Dallas and Carolina came to an agreement about the trade between the teams, the initial contract extension talks between Dallas and Rantanen’s camp found the sides in disagreement about numbers.

Dallas set $12 million as their highest internal number (though they may not have even gone that high in initial talks with Rantanen) for average annual value, with Rantanen asking for something like $13 million or more.

Such a wide gap wasn’t surprising, given what had already trickled out into the public sphere. The Avalanche have been reported to have sort-of offered up to $11.75 million per year to Rantanen’s camp in the sort-of negotiations that happened before they pulled the sort-of ripcord. The Hurricanes acquired Rantanen, then they offered him over $13 million per year, but that wasn’t enough to get it done, either.

Dallas was one of those teams, And since Dallas wasn’t willing to pay the steep price Carolina wanted just to get Rantanen as a rental (which Nill confirmed on Friday), the trade really only made sense for the Stars if Rantanen or Dallas were willing to budge on numbers. Friday morning, neither was. That’s when other teams were likely brought back into the conversation, with Carolina desperate to extract maximum value from whatever team they could.

Tulsky said after the trade that the Hurricanes were willing to keep Rantanen if they hadn’t gotten a trade return that would make it worth it for them not to keep Rantanen for one playoff run. You can believe that or not, but it sounds like they got multiple offers worth considering—though they never found a package they liked as much as Dallas’s.

Nick Kypreos, in fact, said he heard Toronto offered two first-round picks of their own, along with two prospects in Easton Cowan and Fraser Minten—the latter of which would later be dealt to Boston in a package for defenseman Brandon Carlo.

But Dallas’s package was centered around two first-round picks and “just” Logan Stankoven, whom Carolina saw as providing more immediate help to the team than either of Minten or Cowan. That factor is vital for Tulsky, who has the daunting job of selling the trade to Rod Brind’amour and his players, who just saw two first-line players get shipped out of Carolina in the last six weeks.

“He’s a really aggressive player just by nature,” Tulsky said of Stankoven. “When the puck’s on his stick, he’s really shifty with it…He’s not the tallest guy in the world, but he plays bigger than he looks, and he plays hard and he competes hard. And that’s what we look for in a Hurricanes player.”

Suffice it to say, Stankoven is going to get every chance in the world to show that he was worth all the upheaval of the last six weeks in Carolina. That’s a lot of pressure, yes; but it will also be a lot of opportunity for Stankoven, who was admittedly upset by the trade.

Still, Stankoven wasn’t on the table if Rantanen wasn’t willing to come down to meet Dallas’s lower ask for a contract extension. And early Friday morning, that gap still seemed to be insurmountable.

“I had one executive who sent me a note today,” said Friedman, “Saying, ‘You have no idea how many teams in the NHL are trying to ruin this trade.’”

“I heard there was a time,” Elliotte Friedman said on 32 Thoughts, “That people didn’t think it was gonna get done. I heard at a time that they couldn’t bridge the gap…I heard at one time Dallas was willing to walk away and say, ‘forget it. We’ll go do some other things.’”

With some teams, that might have been a bluff before the team eventually caved in service to getting a big-name player on a big day. But for a team like Dallas—whom Jim Nill emphasized had a great group at forward even before adding Rantanen—it was probably a genuine stance. You don’t win GM of the Year awards by backing down, after all.

His patience was rewarded when things changed between then and the 2:00pm trade deadline. Rantanen would end up telling his agent to meet Dallas closer to their number after all, and the $12 million-per-year extension was enough to get the deal done, sending every studio show into a frenzy, with panelists tearing apart Carolina and even Colorado (who probably could have signed Rantanen for a similar amount, as he never wanted to leave in the first place). And of course, Toronto also took some strays.

“Some days,” Jim Nill said on Friday of trade deadlines, “You come in, and you just got a good feeling, like ‘I know what’s gonna happen,’ and bang, bang, bang, it happens. Other times you go in, and it’s a roller coaster. This one was a real roller coaster.”

That’s a mild way of describing the Stars’ pursuit of one of the top-10 players in the NHL, a pursuit that Nill admitted has meant very little sleep for him and his staff over the last 48 hours. But when you’re pursuing an elite player—someting the Stars haven’t had for a long time—sleep is a tertiary concern.

Given how the day went down, Rantanen’s original list of teams he was interested in may not have been very long. And while Rantanen said that his list of teams was bigger than just a sticky note with “DALLAS PLEASE” written on it, most of the talk has been about the teams he didn’t sign with. Because Dallas was clearly a favorite in more ways than one.

“It was very clear to me from what I heard last night,” said Friedman, “That people believe Rantanen really wanted to go to Dallas…there was a time today, for about 30 minutes to an hour, where I thought there was a decent chance the trade might fall apart. But I think you did say over the last half hour that ultimately the player said, ‘I want to go to Dallas. Get it done.’”

And that’s what happened. Rantanen flew out to Edmonton immediately on Friday—so hurriedly, we’re told, that he wasn’t able to jump on a Zoom to do the standard media availability when a player is traded—and he’ll be in the lineup for Dallas Saturday night against the team that knocked them out of the playoffs last spring.

“Dallas and Carolina both bet that he wanted to play [in Dallas],” said Friedman, “And everybody bent a little bit. I think $12 [million] was even higher than Dallas wanted to do.”

Rantanen now has 20 games to show he’ll fit in better with Dallas’s rush-based offense than he did into Carolina’s cycle. But as Nill said today, players with elite levels of skill like Rantanen usually find a way to adapt.

Especially when they wind up where they really want to be.