Rantanen is a one-man supernova for Stars
He kicks his ex-teammates from Colorado out of the playoffs with a stunning third period, and now the second-guessing begins.
Saturday night was the end of Mikko Rantanen’s First 100 Days. Dallas hockey fans already want to re-elect him. Colorado hockey fans already want to bring in DOGE.
It wasn’t enough that the Avalanche lost Game 7 of its first-round series after it had led 2-0 in the third period. Rantanen, the royal power forward whom Colorado had traded 100 days ago, was the proximate cause. He scored the first two Dallas goals and assisted 21-year-old Wyatt Johnson on the third, and the Stars won, 4-2. eliminating Colorado just as they had done last year. The Stars’ fans were ready to canonize a player they had feared until they got him on March 7, although they’d never seen Rantanen conquer a game quite like this. As Vin Scully might have said, he hoisted Colorado on its own petard.
Obviously the Avalanche would have kept Rantanen had it known he would wind up in Dallas, an all-too-familiar conference rival. The original trade was to Carolina, in exchange for winger Martin Necas and center Jack Drury. Rantanen is entering free agency and the Hurricanes only wanted him for the long term. They were in a heavy stretch of road games, and Rantanen was having trouble adjusting to Carolina’s frenetic, high-volume style. Contract talks were grounded, and the ‘Canes realized it was time for Plan B. They dealt him to Dallas for two first-round picks and winger Logan Stankoven. The Stars quickly inked Rantanen to an eight-year deal worth $12 million per.
That probably came as a shock to Colorado, since Rantanen had been angling for the type of $14 million a year deal that Leon Draisaitl got in Edmonton. The Avalanche was already paying MVP Nathan MacKinnon $12 million a year and was poised to start extension talks with Cale Makar, the former Norris Trophy winner. The club suddenly pulled the chair, Karl Malone style, and Rantanen, who uses the same agent Draisaitl does, was incredulous. So was MacKinnon: “I never thought in a million years he’d leave. It just sucks.”
But for a while it worked better for Colorado than for Rantanen. Necas scored 28 points in 30 games while he played alongside MacKinnon. Rantanen had two goals in 13 games for Carolina, five in 20 for Dallas. Maybe osmosis was at work, reminiscent of Wayne Gretzky’s days in Edmonton, when anybody who skated on his line had a chance to be an All-Star. Maybe Rantanen was only a man in full when with MacKinnon.
And through four games of this series, Rantanen was essentially an onlooker, with one assist. But in games 5-7, he had 11 points, including eight in the final two games. He triggered the rush at the end of Game 5 that helped create Johnston’s game-winner and a 3-2 series lead. And he did what he did in the third period Saturday without help from MacKinnon. He scored four points in that period, which tied an NHL playoff record, the same one Rantanen had tied with four points in the second period of Game 6.
With 12:11 left in the third, the Avalanche led 2-0. Rantanen went on a solo sortie through the Colorado defense and scored on Mackenzie Blackwood. Then the Avalanche seemed to regain control when they got a man-advantage, but Makar’s stick broke as he shot, and the puck and the Stars went thataway. Makar was whistled for tripping Roope Hintz of the other end. When Dallas got a 5-on-4 situation, Rantanen swooped behind the net and came out on the right side before Blackwood could adjust. He threw the puck into open space, and it doinked off the skate of Colorado’s Sam Gerard and into the net.
Now all bets were off. With 3:56 left, Drury was whistled for a bear-hug on Tyler Seguin. Rantanen quickly set up to Blackwood’s left and passed across the crease to Johnston, who was standing on the goal line and still defied geometry with the game-winner. The rest was local jubilation, and MacKinnon, for the second time in 100 days, expressing shock over an event involving Rantanen.
Colorado had every advantage coming in. Jason Robertson, normally Dallas’ best offensive player, was out. So was Miro Heiskanen, the Stars’ best defenseman. Alex Petrovic, who had played six NHL games since 2019, rose up to bolster the Dallas defense, but Colorado still piled up 16 goals in its three wins.
Makar, for the first time in his career, was a neutral factor, getting one goal in the seven games. Same for Necas. Drury, who took the last penalty, was part of the trade. It was left to MacKinnon to score seven of the 24 goals. Looking through the wrong end of the binoculars, it would have behooved Colorado to keep Rantanen until season’s end, new contract or no. But no one was saying that, three weeks ago.
Another consensus opinion was that Dallas had the league’s best roster even before Rantanen and would be a, or maybe the, Stanley Cup favorite. Then the Stars lost their last seven regular-season games. That was a head fake. There was little to play for, after Winnipeg wrapped up the division championship. More important, coach Peter deBoer is now 9-0 in Game 7s, which is a new standard in any American major sport. He begs off any explanation, saying most of those wins were at home at either San Jose, New Jersey, Vegas and now Dallas, but nine wins would seem to exceed the boundaries of coincidence. Red Auerbach was 8-0 with the Celtics. Darryl Sutter had eight Game 7 wins in the NHL, in 11 tries.
“I’ve never won a Game 7 before,” Rantanen said. But he now has 39 goals and 113 points in 88 career goals. He spent a long time in the postgame handshake line, embracing and commiserating with MacKinnon, Makar, coach Jared Bednar and the rest of the guys with whom he shared a trench.
“These are my brothers,” Rantanen said later. “They were my enemies in this series, but I love every one of those guys. It was emotional.”
The Finnish star didn’t let any rancor slip out, but it was one of the most decisive cases of square-settling we’ve ever seen in professional sports. In 2009 Brett Favre went to the Vikings , after a year with the Jets, because his Packers didn’t want him back. Minnesota beat Green Bay twice that year, including a memorable 3-touchdown game for Favre in Lambeau Field. That was obsessively covered and analyzed, but it still wasn’t a playoff game.
In 1989, Gretzky and his new Los Angeles teammates fell behind Edmonton, 3-1, in the first round and came back to win. But that doesn’t count either, because the cataclysmic 1988 trade was as much Gretzky’s idea as anyone else’s.
There are several morals of this story, but the main one is this: If you have a great player, pay him and keep him. And if you can’t, squeeze every goal, bucket, RBI or touchdown out of him before he has to go. You’ll rarely, if ever, get equal value for him. The Avalanche, in the end, had to be reminded that Rantanen was indeed that type of player. Suddenly they have plenty of time to review it. As a writer for Sportsnet.ca observed, “Revenge is best served cold. In fact, it’s best served on ice.”
And the difference between the hockey playoffs and the rest of current affairs is that we really can’t wait for the Next 100 Days.