Mikko Rantanen plays in Hurricanes' win as trade-deadline drama reaches its peak

RALEIGH, N.C. — Oh, the drama.

So much drama.

Less than 24 hours ahead of the trade deadline, with the hockey world wondering whether the Carolina Hurricanes will cut their losses with Mikko Rantanen or keep him as what might be a very expensive deadline rental, the Hurricanes sent Riley Stillman out for warmups as an extra skater.

The smart move, if the Hurricanes were going to flip Rantanen because of his unwillingness to take the $100 million-plus they had offered him, would be to hold Rantanen out of Thursday’s game against the Boston Bruins. Protect the asset and all that.

And as game time approached, Stillman was in the lineup. But not for Rantanen — for an injured Dmitri Orlov, who withdrew after warm-ups. Rantanen played as usual, like it was any other night, not the night before the trade deadline.

The Hurricanes may yet decide to get what they can for Rantanen on Friday, but his presence on the ice Thursday indicates their plan is to ride it out, see what happens over the next one, two or three months and worry about next season — or, potentially, the next eight seasons — later.

The Hurricanes may work the angles and look for every edge, but even their questionable decisions are usually errors of commission, not stupidity. Even the trade for Rantanen was a swing for the fences.

Even if they can’t eventually sign him in June, they could still do a sign-and-trade before July 1, because they’re the only team that can offer him eight years instead of seven, but the return on that would be limited. Friday is their last chance to get anything worth having for him, and even that likely would be less than they gave up to get him.

In other words, just as the Hurricanes rolled the dice when they made the trade that they could persuade Rantanen to sign with them, they appear ready to roll the dice now that they didn’t swap Martin Necas and Jack Drury to the Colorado Avalanche for a few months of Rantanen.

Not that the first month of Rantanen has screamed “superstar.” On a 38-point pace, playing less than 20 minutes a night, he looks more like, say, Nino Niederreiter. Nothing wrong with that in a vacuum, but no one’s handing Niederreiter $13 million.

Thursday’s 3-2 win over the Bruins — the Hurricanes’ 100th straight home sellout — was another chapter in the same story: One nice pass along the boards, two good scoring chances thumped against the goalie’s pads, no points, minus-1 in 20:47. At one point, former Hurricanes depth forward Patrick Brown plucked the puck right off his blade. Rantanen refused to speak with the media after the morning skate. His performance in the evening didn’t exactly speak for him.

Or maybe it spoke volumes. The Hurricanes remain confident he can be the elite winger he was in Colorado, even without Nathan McKinnon as his center, but they’ve yet to see it here. If Rantanen has questions about his fit here, in this lineup, in this system, it’s hard to blame him. And perhaps above all that, given the shock of the trade and uncertainty about his future, how could anyone be at their best these past weeks?

“Since he got here, it’s been pretty tough,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “And tonight was probably the toughest.”

To be fair, it’s been hard on everyone, and Rantanen won’t be the only player glad to see the deadline pass, for one reason or another. His Finnish countryman Sebastian Aho has been caught in the middle of all of this, a loyal member of the Hurricanes who also wants the best for his close friend.

“Yeah, I mean, I care about him, care about this team, care about this organization,” Aho said. “Whatever, I mean, goes, we’re all aware. You hear all the noise and know all that stuff. I just try to be there for him and pull the same rope as a group and let the other people do the talking.”

We may never know whether the Hurricanes were given handshake assurances that Rantanen would sign that were later withdrawn, or whether they just misread the situation all on their own, but they made the deal with a tremendous amount of confidence that he would sign. This is not a position they expected to find themselves navigating.

And yet even after jumping the market six weeks ahead of the trade deadline, they’ll still be a main character on the day itself, even if they end up doing nothing.

“Every year we talk about it, but this one’s obviously just much — because of the circumstances, who we’re talking about and everything, it’ll be nice to put it behind us here,” Brind’Amour said.

Again, the drama.

If the NFL is a soap opera in pads, 12 months of the year, in and out of season — and now in Chapel Hill! — the NHL trade deadline is like that for a month in Canada, especially on the day itself, when every television is tuned to breathless coverage. In some ways, that’s a relic of the past, when a flurry of last-second deals would clog the fax machine in Toronto and the backlog would take hours to sort.

Nowadays, the bigger deals tend to happen in the days ahead of the deadline, which can leave the countdown coverage focusing more on trades that never happen rather than ones that do. Friday, that could mean hours of Rantanen speculation, especially if things are slow elsewhere.

“The noise will be gone and we can really focus on ourselves,” said Hurricanes forward Seth Jarvis, who capitalized on a broken stick to score the game winner with 18.6 seconds to play. “It’s part of the job and it’s part of being a professional, but it is tough.”

And then, after 3 p.m., they will have at least some degree of clarity, one way or another.

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