The message from the Colorado Avalanche was the same three days after Mikko Rantanen ended its season as it was the day after the club sent him away.
Colorado needed to get deeper. The Avs were not good enough or deep enough to win the Stanley Cup this year at the time of the trade. Negotiations with Rantanen and his agent didn’t yield a new contract that the Avs felt would allow them to be deep enough in the future.
“We felt we had a decision to make,” Avs president Joe Sakic said Tuesday. “We weren’t good enough. We weren’t deep enough.
“We felt we had to get deeper, and not only for this season’s team, but moving forward. Just paying three high-end guys and not having the surrounding cast wasn’t going to get it done.”
So off he went, to the Carolina Hurricanes in a three-team blockbuster that netted Martin Necas, Jack Drury, a 2025 second-round pick and a 2026 fourth-round pick.
But what if there is an alternate universe out there where the Avs kept Rantanen for the rest of this season? Could the Avalanche have gotten deeper between Jan. 24 and the trade deadline, but still had one of the great playoff performers in NHL history on its side?
The answer, with some caveats, is yes.
The first obvious caveat is that there will be some sentences during this exercise where it feels like hindsight is doing some work. We’re going to try and limit that as much as possible.
The second obvious caveat about this exercise is that no decision is made in a vacuum. Every trade, win, loss, injury, etc., changes the future, so there’s no way to just say “don’t do the Rantanen trade, but do the rest” in real life.
Had Colorado not traded Rantanen on Jan. 24, would the Avs have waited until March 1 to make their first of four trades before the deadline to shore up their depth? Maybe not.
That said, if we do just remove the Rantanen trade from the ledger, the Avs did have enough long-term injury reserve cap relief to make all of the other deals work.
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Use one of the salary cap website roster-building tools and reconstruct the Avs with Rantanen and without Necas/Drury. It works … with Keaton Middleton sent to the minors to make room for Erik Johnson.
It would have left Colorado with about $645,000 in space. And Parker Kelly would be the No. 4 center, not Drury. The Kelly-Drury-Logan O’Connor line never happens, but the Avs’ first two lines for Game 4 could have read Lehkonen-MacKinnon-Rantanen and Landeskog-Nelson-Nichushkin.
Given the sequence of events, the Avs would have had about $1.6 million to play with after the trade for Charlie Coyle and before the Johnson trade. So there would have been a little time to pursue another center instead of Johnson. Or they could have even gotten more ruthless and put Jimmy Vesey on waivers the day before, freeing up another $800,000 to possibly add Johnson and another No. 4 center on deadline day.
Here’s where a little hindsight shows up. The Avs only had Vesey for a few days at that point. Both he and Johnson were added because the club expected a long run and they might have been needed later on. Especially Vesey, because Gabe Landeskog still felt miles away from playing the first week of March.
The third big caveat in this exercise: What about the extra assets they got from Carolina?
This is where things get a little fuzzy.
Colorado still has the 2026 fourth-round pick, but that 2025 second-rounder from the Hurricanes went to Boston in the Coyle deal. Now, there’s a pretty fair argument that the Avs gave up too much for Coyle.
If this team went on a deep run or even won the Cup, that wouldn’t have mattered to anyone. Flags fly forever. But, a second-round pick and a solid prospect (William Zellers) — not to mention a more productive player (Casey Mittelstadt) — was a lot.
What could the Avs have added to the trade instead of a 2025 second to entice the Bruins? Would a 2027 second (Colorado had already moved its 2026 second) have still gotten a deal done? Maybe that and a slightly better prospect than Zellers … though the Avs are pretty short in that department as well.
Avalanche GM Chris MacFarland has also said on multiple occasions that the Rantanen trade gave his club “more ammo.” This is even further into the weeds, but would the Avs’ front office have felt confident enough to make all of those moves without having that valuable second-round pick in the war chest?
Let’s say the Avs do figure out the Coyle deal. Are they better with Rantanen and Kelly at 4C, plus all the other upgrades? Rantanen doesn’t light them up in the first round, at least.
Let’s say they can’t make the Coyle deal without that 2025 second. Would the Avs have been better in the playoffs with Rantanen, Mittelstadt and a different 4C instead of Necas, Coyle and Drury? Mittelstadt was lost in the woods before the trade, but he also played well for the Avs in the 2024 playoffs.
Going beyond this season is an exercise for another day. Would the Avs and Rantanen’s camp have eventually found common ground, even if it didn’t happen until late in the process? Maybe.
Would the Avs have been better in this postseason with No. 96 in burgundy and blue? Hard to argue against it, given that Rantanen woke up Thursday morning as the leading candidate for the Conn Smythe Trophy.
It would have been tricky to keep him and still make the other upgrades. Maybe it’s the Lindgren-Vesey trade that doesn’t work, and a different No. 4/5 defenseman ends up on the roster.
But it might have worked. Maybe somewhere out there in the multiverse, it actually did and that Avalanche team is still playing.
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