Mikko Rantanen helped Carolina win a Stanley Cup after all

Mikko Rantanen's 13 games with the Carolina Hurricanes helped build a Stanley Cup winner, whether he wanted to be a part of it or not (he wasn't).

The Carolina Hurricanes are one of the most fascinating Stanley Cup champions in recent memory for me, and it’s largely due to the way their roster has been constructed over the past decade.

They busted a lot of narratives about how you have to win and how you have to build a winner, and also showed there is a path forward for teams that are not consistently picking at the top of the draft or going through a full-scale “tanking” rebuild.

You do need to draft well in other areas.

You do need to develop your players well, even if it’s just to give you more trade assets to get the players you ultimately win with.

You do need to collect and stockpile a lot of assets.

You do need to be smart with your talent evaluation and salary cap management.

Every team needs to do that to some degree. That is not unique here.

But you also need to be fearless in your aggressiveness and not be afraid to take a chance or make a mistake.

You have to be bold and not really care what outside voices think.

The latter two areas are where Carolina really shined. It all traces back to one move that set off a chain reaction of corresponding moves that ultimately turned the Hurricanes into a champion.

It may not have been the way they originally drew it up, and it may not have been the original plan, but being willing to adapt is also a necessity.

Not every team or management group has that sort of confidence or vision.

This Hurricanes roster did not have a true “superstar” anywhere on it, at least not in the traditional sense of a top-10 or-15 scorer in the NHL.

What they had instead was the deepest, most well-balanced roster in the league that had zero weaknesses that could be exploited. No defense pairing was vulnerable. No forward line was a liability. They had multiple goalies they could trust and were not afraid to play.

This isn’t to say they didn’t have high-end players. Because they do. And they have a lot of them. There just wasn’t a McDavid, Crosby, Ovechkin or Kucherov level scorer or name here. Even the Vegas team they beat in the Stanley Cup Final had the more individual star power at the top of the lineup in Jack Eichel and Mitch Marner.

But there was no line or pairing in Carolina that offered any opponent a break during a 60-minute game or seven-game series.

A lot of times in the playoffs, success (and failure) is not necessarily determined by what you have and what you do well, but instead by what can be exploited and what will hold you back. In a best-of-seven series teams and coaches are scouting harder and more in-depth than they do for run-of-the-mill regular season games, and they are going to find something that will expose itself and become a liability over seven games.

There was nothing here to be exposed. Nothing to be exploited. They just steamrolled over every team they faced and nobody had an answer for any of it. That is a testament not only to the players and head coach Rod Brind’Amour for the system they implemented and played, but also the front office for constructing the team in the manner in which it did.

And I am still fascinated by the way this team was constructed.

We have talked about playoff team roster construction in this space a lot this postseason, and now that we have the championship team it is worth looking at again.

They didn’t “tank” in the traditional sense, even going back to the years prior to this run starting. They were very much a “mushy middle” team for a few years, and when you look at the playoff roster there was only one player on the team that Carolina itself selected with a top-five pick — Andrei Svechnikov at No. 2 overall in 2018.

And even in that instance, it wasn’t the result of a full-scale tank or massive teardown. They finished with the 11th-worst record in the NHL that season (mushy middle) and simply had a tremendous amount of lottery luck on their side to move up nine spots.

Luck is a massive part of a championship team, and it comes in a lot of different forms. Sometimes it is the bounce of a puck during a game. Sometimes it is the bounce of a lottery ball.

Some of the best players on the roster came from the second-round (or later), and were the result of strong scouting, even better player development and great coaching.

They complemented that core group with smart free agent signings that did not break the budget or carry bad contracts, and perhaps most importantly, they became extremely aggressive in recent years when it came to trades.

The most important of those trade sequences came in the middle of the 2024-25 season when they acquired Mikko Rantanen from the Colorado Avalanche, and then shockingly turned around and traded him 13 games later.

When the initial trade was made there was a belief that the presence of Rantanen was going to be the move that put them over the top and get them a championship.

In a very indirect way it sort of was … but only because it gave them Rantanen to use as a trade chip.

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Between 2018-19 and 2024-25, the Hurricanes were objectively one of the most successful organizations in the NHL. Their regular season success was nearly unmatched. They routinely advanced beyond the first round of the playoffs and found themselves playing in the second and third rounds. But while they kept getting to the front door of the Stanley Cup Final, they were never able to kick it in. There was always something holding them back. Every year that “something” always seemed to be a lack of goal-scoring in the later rounds against the small handful of teams in the league that were on their level.

They worked tirelessly to try and remedy that.

At the 2024 trade deadline they acquired pending unrestricted free agent Jake Guentzel from the Pittsburgh Penguins. He was a tremendous fit and delivered everything Carolina expected from him in his brief time with the team. But the Hurricanes still exited in the second round, and then watched as Guentzel turned down a long-term contract offer and eventually signed with the Tampa Bay Lightning.

It was a good swing, but it ultimately missed.

The next year they took another massive swing, with another pending unrestricted free agent, and acquired Rantanen from the Colorado Avalanche as part of a three-team trade.

Only this time they knew ahead of time that Rantanen was not going to re-sign. Rather than take one all-or-nothing run with him and risk losing him for nothing after the season, they decided to take the PR hit, re-trade him before the deadline, and get a massive haul back that directly led to them adding Logan Stankoven, K’Andre Miller and Nikolaj Ehlers on to the roster the following offseason.

It is one of the biggest factors that put them over the top and has also help set them up for what should be a run of success.

They may not have to wait another 20 years for their next championship.

Let’s talk about that, the aftermath of the trade, the roster construction in general and what lessons can be taken from how they did it all.