Mikko Rantanen opens his Carolina Hurricanes account, but real returns on trade await
When Mikko Rantanen was traded to a high-flying Stanley Cup contender, he probably didn’t envision making his debut in his new city playing next to a pair of AHL call-ups, Juha Jaaska and Ryan Suzuki.
Yet that’s where Rantanen found himself in the second period Thursday, double-shifting on the fourth line as the Carolina Hurricanes played a man short with Sebastian Aho and Taylor Hall — their other newcomer — both calling in sick against the woebegone Chicago Blackhawks.
On his next shift, playing with NHL veterans, Rantanen opened his account with his new team. A no-look, behind-the-back drop pass from Jack Roslovic sprung Rantanen into open space on the left wing, and Rantanen scored his 26th of the season and first with the Hurricanes in his first game at the Lenovo Center, a 3-2 win.
“It was great,” Rantanen said. “Playing here as an away team, it was always one of the toughest buildings, so I was happy that we only came here once. I like the city and everything, but the building is tough to play in, so I’m happy to be on the home side. And the crowd was great. Got some chills.”
With Aho and Hall both out — Roslovic missed one game with the bug that’s running rampant through the dressing room, so presumably not for long — Hurricanes fans will have to wait a bit longer to see their new battle station fully operational, not that it mattered against the Blackhawks. Jaaska and Suzuki would have found the talent level on the lower half of Chicago’s roster rather familiar.
Fans certainly recognized one of the players on the upper half of that roster; Teuvo Teravainen had an atypically broad smile in response to the team’s acknowledgment of his return.
A week after the Hurricanes sent seismic waves through the NHL by acquiring Rantanen, a top-three player at his position in the prime of his career, the reverberations were finally starting to fade as the league got its mind around the possibilities of a player like Rantanen in a system like the Hurricanes surrounded by players like Seth Jarvis and Andrei Svechnikov and Aho, if not the latter Thursday.
Seeing him at home, on this ice in the black sweater, finally makes it feel real — less like a trade someone made on the PlayStation, editing Rantanen onto the Carolina roster, more like the tangible future.
Because it is still a little hard to believe. Players like this don’t often get traded, and when they do, it doesn’t happen in the middle of a season. Even parting with Martin Necas and Jack Drury, the Hurricanes found a way to substantially upgrade their talent level, and that’s even if Hall doesn’t do much. (The suspicion here is that he will, especially in the playoffs when matchups always loom larger.)
It’s also impossible, at this point, to assess. The real returns remain so far down the road. In the postseason, depending on whether he can help the Hurricanes progress farther than they have previously. In the offseason, depending if he re-signs and converts this from a high-profile, pre-deadline rental into a long-term, franchise-changing commitment.
There’s no way to make any judgments in January. The Hurricanes were and are a playoff team with and without Rantanen; his arrival raises their ceiling but the Hurricanes are months away from finding out just how high it is.
“He wants to come in and contribute right away,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour. “And you know, ‘You got to be on the scoresheet,’ everyone’s looking at you, and now he has. He’s got his goal and he was impactful. He could have had a couple tonight.”
On this night, it was good enough that he was here. And on the scoresheet. The rest can wait.
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This story was originally published January 30, 2025 at 9:44 PM with the headline "Mikko Rantanen opens his Carolina Hurricanes account, but real returns on trade await."
