The Discourse: Reflections on Rantanen, Carolina's perspective, a half-disaster vs Edmonton, and a half-snoozefest vs Vancouver

Early return on that trade? Stupid good. The rest of the team? There's still work to be done.

Looking back on my reaction to the Mikko Rantanen blockbuster, I can see how I might have come across as detached. There was no excitement in my writing, to the point where I probably sounded like a tax consultant.

To be fair, I was exhausted from the fact that I got little sleep the night before, since the night before was when Elliotte Friedman decided to drop the massive news about talks intensifying between Dallas and Carolina about Rantanen. If you follow me on social media, you probably also saw the idiotic stuff I was posting. Point being, I was tired. None of it sounded possible, and I wasn’t in the mood to deal with high expectations only for the deal to fall through. With a clearer head, I can say this with certainty: Dallas didn’t just level up. They are a different team.

That sounds kind of funny, but I’ll return to this theme in the Edmonton recap. We had this discussion in the Stack chat when the rumors were swirling re: who is Rantanen without Nathan MacKinnon? This is really the soul of the deal, IMO: is Rantanen that gamebreaker that has eluded Dallas for so long? While it’s a fair question on the surface, I don’t think it’s fair to elite players. Who was the last Jonathan Cheechoo anyway? This question understates how much this is true for the large majority of elite players. And that itself further understates why it’s not a coincidence that all the game’s best players play for the best teams.

Who is Jack Eichel without Mark Stone? Who is Mitch Marner without Auston Matthews? Who is Thomas Harley without Miro Heiskanen? Who is Roope Hintz without Jason Robertson? You need other great players to be maximized¹. Turns out, Rantanen is a 100-point winger with a great player in an ideal system.

Now, Dallas doesn’t have a MacKinnon. No. But they do have the best rush attack² in hockey, and a new power play unit that is on its way to making history in a very short amount of time. For a handy visual, here’s Neil Payne on the value Dallas added using Goals Above Replacement.

Data and visual courtesy of Neil’s Substack.

There’s a lot more to unpack here, and I’ll be writing about it tomorrow for D Magazine — about Jim Nill, specifically, and what it means for Dallas to see him make a move that he doesn’t ever make. Rantanen is here for another eight years. And that’s the key. Dallas got a lot better for a very long time. I just wanted to say that in case the message got lost in my initial reaction.

Carolina’s perspective

I have a lot of fun talking about hockey wherever I go. And I like to go wherever I can. Dimitri Filipovic’s Discord is one of the best places to talk about hockey, but it’s also an opinionated place, so I ended up with a lot of pushback when I said that Carolina did good here. “But with Rantanen, Carolina could have gone for it.” Hold that thought. My contention runs on the following bullet points.

• Logan Stankoven’s value.

• Carolina’s value as a Cup contender.

• Carolina’s contention window.

• Weighing plan A from Plan B.

Before the season started, everyone agreed that Stankoven would be in contention for the Calder Trophy, if not a favorite. Did that change? I don’t think so, in my humble opinion. This year became a perfect storm of obstacles between the slow start of the forwards (Dallas was 18th in Goals For in October), constant line juggling, and a hex from the hockey gods. Unsurprisingly, his production hit a wall when he started playing more with Sam Steel, Mavrik Bourque, and Oskar Bäck despite out-producing them by a large-ish margin. All of his underlying numbers scream breakout, in addition to the fact that I have a hard time believing the player from that Vegas series — as brutal, and exhausting a playoff series there was — who excelled even as he was being tombstoned, has magically disappeared.

To the second point, I know Dom’s model had Carolina as the betting favorite with Rantanen on their roster. I respectfully disagree. Your centers below Sebastian Aho are Jordan Staal and Jesperi Kotkaniemi. With Brent Burns finally hitting that inevitable wall, the blueline becomes a mirage. You can’t convince me that Carolina’s anomalous outcomes isn’t affecting these anomalous projections. Also, a bad power play is always a red flag for a team creating momentum. The average power play rank among Cup winners over the last 10 years is eighth. Carolina is 25th. And yes, that matches Vegas’ rank from when they won the Cup. You want to have some things in common with a Cup champ, but not everything.

That raises the question: could Carolina even with Rantanen plus some deadline additions beat either Florida or Tampa? I don’t think so. At some point, the Hurricanes will have to ask themselves whether having a high floor is good enough; perhaps even raise questions about Rod Brind’Amour’s obsession with cycle offense. For me this comes down to this: next year. Next year Carolina will have 37 million to work with. Their core pieces are already signed long term. Dimitri Orlov comes off the books, which sets the stage for Alexander Nikishin—nicknamed ‘Boom’—who needed just three seasons to set the SKA record for goals by a defender in the KHL, to finally make his long-awaited NHL debut. Plus Scott Morrow looks amazing³. You might even call him the defensive version of Stankoven, making him the ideal centerpiece for a swing for Erik Karlsson? Perhaps they make a run of Mitch Marner? Regardless, they have all the assets in the world now to outbid others with a shifting window.

This might seem like a lot of gymnastics to carry Eric Tulsky’s water when he could have just kept Martin Necas and saved himself the hassle, but I don’t think so. Here’s the thing about trying, and trying sincerely: it doesn’t always work out. They wanted Rantanen to extend. He didn’t. So they pivoted. How many other teams would have sat around and sulked about how hard it is to be a GM? You don’t even need to look at the past, like Calgary. Just look at the now in Vancouver, with Patrick Allvin more or less saying “it’s the player’s job to do my job.”⁴

For far too long, teams have only seen themselves as sellers when they’re gonna miss the playoffs. Those that are on the cusp lie to themselves about how making the playoffs means having a chance to win, as if winning a round or two is the same as having a chance to win the Cup. It’s not. Whether Tulsky thought that or not, I don’t know. But he didn’t lose Rantanen for nothing, took a step back, and might have positioned the team to take two steps forward next year. In Dallas Stars terms, how might fortunes have changed if Dallas — realizing they weren’t serious contenders in 2022 (which they weren’t) — had traded John Klingberg for assets instead of losing him for nothing?⁵ And also:

Dallas vs. Edmonton: Don’t call it a comeback. Because it wasn’t.

The Oilers game was fun, odd, and like with anything in hockey at times: amorphous. It was an easy game to overreact to because Dallas looked bad. That’s actually not correct. They didn’t look bad. The parts of their game that they’re still deficient in looked bad. I’m talking about the defense away from goaltending (or defense in other words). Whenever Razor says “the neutral zone was wide open” don’t turn that into a drinking game because Dallas allows a lot in the neutral zone. I’ll just leave this shameless plug here.

However, this is what I liked about the Rantanen move. By adding Rantanen, Dallas leaned into their strengths, turning a strength into a ballistic missile. Yes, I would have liked to see Dallas add a proper top four defender. But Nill is taking his own gambit: replacing Chris Tanev would have been nice, but there are different ways to replace a player. One way is to find a player like Tanev. Another way is to add a crapload of offense to the lineup so that needing Tanev is no longer a requirement.

Right away we saw this element in action. Dallas gave up a lot. In fact, they fell right into the deadfall. Yet look at what they were able to do with just one player. Rantanen wasn’t the only goal scorer of course, but he was a big part of Dallas’ ability to draw back into a game that they were statistically out of reach in.

This is what I mean when I say Dallas is a different team in many ways. The absence of Miro Heiskanen highlights this element in a way that might be misleading, however, I think the principle still holds true — while Pete DeBoer and the coaching staff will preach team defense, it’s not how they’re gonna win. They’re gonna win with an unstoppable offense. I’m not saying this is the 2016 Lindy Ruff team all over again. It’s not. Not by a long shot. But it is a team that’ll need to leverage a Ruff-esque system when the gamestates demand it. And I’m not sure anybody will be able to do it better when it gets down to the marrow⁶. The shot quality battle between players illustrates this.

So yea, it was a tough loss. But squint your eyes, and you can pull plenty of positives from it.

Dallas vs. Vancouver: Burn the tape. No offense.

This kind of writes itself, doesn’t it? Where the Edmonton game was a loss with some positives, the Vancouver game was a win with some negatives.

The first half of the game was as exciting as rearranging sock drawers. It wasn’t for lack of effort, and that’s not a knock on Dallas. The Stars looked like a team on the backend of a B2B, while the Canucks looked like a rested bad team who can only leverage their hex against Dallas. Except for Mikael Granlund, it was the usual suspects who scored to pull away, with Thomas harley, Jason Robertson, and Mikko Rantanen (we’re gonna be hearing this name a lot) hitting the net.

Vancouver technically won the shot quality battle.

However, it was largely fueled by Vancouver’s depth players, like Teddy Blueger, Nils Hoglander, and Dakota Joshua.

One thing that goes without saying is that, while we weigh some of these performances against their opponents, this is still a team without Miro Heiskanen. Yes, I’ve been of the opinion that the defense was struggling even with Heiskanen in the lineup — but only as a whole. Heiskanen’s slight depression on the top power play unit also drains, just a little, our collective view of just how great he really is. He’s not perfect, and the power play illustrates his limitations. But before his season ended early, he was on another level. Literally.

Click here for a filthy casual guide to sG.

Nill said in the post-deadline scrum that he didn’t opt for defense because he liked the development of the blueline, with Harley taking the next steps, and Lian Bichsel stepping up. I agree with this in a vacuum, but I don’t think both contributing factors make for a ‘good defense.’ It’s been evident, especially in these last two games, that it is not. But I do think a healthy Heiskanen brings into focus how good even a blueline lacking in depth can look, when its captained by one of the best overall defenders in the game.

1. At this point, this phenomenon is more relevant at lower levels IMO. And even at the highest levels, it’s the less talented players who tend to ride the other’s coattails, like Devin Shore.

2. I’m gonna keep plugging this one until at least one person upgrades to paid.

3. One of the very very few players I thought might be worth taking over Logan Stankoven in 2021.

4. Kudos to Thomas Drance for calling Allvin out on this nonsense.

5. Klingberg’s agent. I know. This is a thought exercise in strict terms about value; not about rehashing history.

6. I know I use this expression way too much. I’ll stop eventually. As soon as I stop re-watching Goon.