Tulsky: Hurricanes 'comfortable' with how Rantanen saga ended

Carolina Hurricanes general manager Eric Tulsky said he was trying to strike a balance when he traded Mikko Rantanen less than two months after acquiring the star forward.

"He's a very good player, and having him with the team (for the rest of the season) would have been a perfectly fine outcome," Tulsky explained after Friday's trade deadline. "Having him for a Cup run would have been good. Maybe we win the Cup with him. We had to weigh that against what we could get in a trade. If the trade offers hadn't been there, then we wouldn't have done it. ... When you move him out, that's a loss for the current year. ... (But) we felt like we were getting enough in this deal that it was the right thing for the organization long term."

He added, "We're comfortable with the way it ended up."

The Hurricanes shipped Rantanen to the Dallas Stars on Friday for a package highlighted by forward Logan Stankoven and two conditional first-round selections.

Tulsky noted that he didn't get the sense that Carolina felt like "home" to Rantanen, who scored two goals and six points in 13 games with the club.

When asked if Carolina attempted to trade one of the picks for another player who could help the team this year, Tulsky said he and his staff didn't have enough time.

"It was a complicated day because the Mikko transaction was consuming a lot of our bandwidth," the executive said. "Honestly, until that transaction closed, we had very little cap space, and so we couldn't execute anything until then. At that point, there wasn't a lot of time left, and the pieces that we had targeted most were not necessarily available.

"It would have been nice if we had been able to bring in another player or two, but it doesn't always work out. ... We have what we have, and we will make the best of it."

The Hurricanes' newest player, Stankoven, is in the midst of his first full NHL season and should be an instant fit in Carolina's system. He's racked up nine goals and 29 points in 59 games, and he had a strong showing in last year's playoffs with eight points in 19 outings.

Stankoven joins a team in second place in the Metropolitan Division with a 37-22-4 record. The Hurricanes have advanced to the conference finals once in the past five seasons and were a second-round exit in 2024.

"On and off the ice, we want to be aggressive whenever we can," Tulsky said. "Being aggressive means taking some risks. ... If the team was already winning Cup after Cup after Cup, maybe that would be a time to be conservative. But we haven't gotten where we want to be yet, so we need to keep taking chances and trying to push things forward."