NHL Trade Deadline thoughts: Dallas is the team to beat, Carolina's problem and more

Mikko Rantanen is going to make the Dallas Stars the team to beat.

Let’s talk about the 2024-25 NHL Trade Deadline and where things stand going into the stretch run of the regular season.

Is Dallas the best team in the NHL now?

That should be the biggest takeaway from the trade deadline after the Stars swooped in and acquired forward Mikko Rantanen from the Carolina Hurricanes for Logan Stankoven, two future first-round picks and two future third-round picks.

Dallas was already an outstanding team.

It has been in the Western Conference Finals two years in a row, in the Conference Finals/Semifinals three times in the past five years, and going into play on Saturday had the third-best points percentage in the NHL.

When healthy, the Stars have top-tier players all over their lineup with Jason Robertson, Miro Heiskanen, Jake Oettinger and Roope Hintz leading the way. Wyatt Johnston is a rising star that might end up being the best of the bunch. And that does not even get into the secondary players that extend the lineup and make it one of the deepest rosters in the league.

They are fourth in the NHL in goals per game, fourth in the NHL in goals against per game, have the sixth-best 5-on-5 goal differential, are top-10 in expected goals share, and have the league’s best penalty kill. They do pretty much everything well, and at an exceptionally high level.

The Stanley Cup was always the goal and within striking distance this season.

Now they are adding a top-10 offensive player in Rantanen, while also managing to get him signed long-term and make him a part of their core group going forward.

Injuries to Tyler Seguin and Heiskanen, resulting in both going on LTIR, opened up the available salary cap space to take the swing on Rantanen and you have to respect the effort and willingness from both ownership and the front office to pay the price for it. Not only in financial terms but also in assets.

That brings us to the other side of that deal in Carolina.

Carolina’s biggest problem in the aftermath is an optics problem

Carolina is going to take the loss on this in the court of public opinion, not only because for the second time in less than a year they were rejected long-term by a top-line scorer that they acquired at the trade deadline, but because they have to take the PR hit of trading Rantanen just one month after initially acquiring him.

When Carolina landed Rantanen from the Colorado Avalanche (for Martin Necas and Jack Drury) it seemed like a dream scenario.

Carolina has been knocking on the door of a championship for the past six years, but has been unable to break through and win it. One of the biggest issues has been the lack of a game-breaking, game-changing superstar scorer that can take over a game or a series by themselves.

Rantanen, in theory, could have been that player.

Given Rantanen’s status as a pending unrestricted free agent there was always an element of risk to it. But I don’t think anybody actually anticipated they would trade him again before the deadline.

The most likely outcome would have been them making a serious run at a championship and trying to win it all, and then dealing with the fallout in the summer.

If you win, does anybody care if Rantanen leaves? Banners hang forever, after all.

If you lose, are you, as Hurricanes fan, really angry that the team swung for the fences? Maybe. But you shouldn’t have been. At least not too much.

Instead, Carolina never let it get to that point and traded him to Dallas for Logan Stankoven, two first-round picks and two third-round picks.

I’m not going to pretend to know the full details of what went down behind the scenes here.

Did Carolina acquire Rantanen with the hopes of getting him to re-sign long-term, with this outcome always being the Plan B if they could not?

Did ownership step in and force something when Rantanen rejected the contract extension offers out of fear of losing another rental for nothing?

Impossible to know.

But if you go back to the start of the season and look at what Carolina started with and where it is now, I am not sure the situation is worse or that the long-term outlook is worse.

If anything, Carolina may have come out ahead in terms of long-term assets.

Follow me here for a minute: If Carolina had tried to trade Necas and Drury in the offseason — and in Necas’ case there was definitely speculation during his RFA situation — would they have gotten a return that equaled Stankoven and four draft picks, including two-first rounders? And that does not even include the Taylor Hall aspect of it who also came to them in the original Rantanen trade.

I don’t think they would have. I know you can’t do it, but if you ignore the three weeks of Rantanen and the chaos that came along with that, they turned Necas and Drury into one hell of a return. Not only does Stankoven have an extremely high ceiling, project to be a top-line player and have another year of league-minimum salary ahead of him, they have two additional first-round draft picks to use as future trade bait. That is significant.

It’s a fascinating situation because in the short-term it does feel like a loss, simply because Rantanen was a potential difference-maker in the playoffs. Now they do not have that, and as much as I love Stankoven’s future and the trade-off from Necas, he is probably not a better player *right now.*

I don’t know if Carolina’s chances of winning a Stanley Cup are better *this season.*

But value-for-value, and looking at the organization from a big-picture perspective? It probably ends up as a strong trade-off long-term from the start of the season..

You’re just never going to get anybody to look at it that way.

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Now for some more quick thoughts on other teams and moves around the league including Toronto, Detroit, Boston and Colorado….