Keeler: Mikko Rantanen hopefully taught Avalanche, Joe Sakic lesson: Don’t trade Stars for scrubs ...Middle East

You don’t trade Stars for scrubs. During the worst Game 7 loss in Avalanche history, Martin Necas and Brock Nelson were passengers from start to Finnish.

“We felt we had to get deeper, and not only for this season’s team, but moving forward,” Joe Sakic said Tuesday afternoon when asked about America’s newest Avs-killer, Mikko Rantanen, the elephant no longer in his room. “Just paying three high-end guys and not having a surrounding cast wasn’t going to get it done.”

Only you know who didn’t get it done, in the end? Sakic’s supporting cast. Necas. Nelson. Charlie Coyle. Jack Drury.

The four Avs forwards who essentially replaced Rantanen, Nathan MacKinnon’s wing man for nearly a decade, totaled 12 points over the seven-game scrap between Colorado and Dallas.

Rantanen put up 12 points all by himself.

“You know, (with) the hockey gods, I think that’s just a way of saying, ‘Did you get the job done or not?” Avs general manager Chris MacFarland said. “Obviously, there were some strange goals both ways in the series. I think you earn your breaks.”

And your scars. Hindsight is 20/20, granted, and the wounds are still agonizingly fresh.

But when the Avs needed somebody to pick up the phone in Game 7 with star defenseman Cale Makar unable to produce, that supporting cast let a series go to voicemail.

Rantanen, traded by the Avs to Carolina on Jan. 25 after 10 years in burgundy and blue, averaged a point a night in playoff Games 6 and 7 with Colorado dating back to 2020.

Necas and Drury had only seen action in seven such tilts over their respective careers with the Hurricanes. They’d totaled just four points between them.

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Drury and Necas combined for two points over the final two games of Avs-Stars. Mikko accounted for eight. Not too shabby for a so-called “MacKinnon Merchant.”

If the fates are kind, the Avs have learned at least two things from the sheer agony of the past weekend. One, Rantanen is a future Hall-of-Famer and one of the best players of his generation. Two, those hockey gods MacFarland referred to tend to frown on trading away quality for quantity.

C-Mac swung big, which you admire, especially given the most recent episodes of The Calvin Booth Story. He also whiffed the way Kris Bryant does on a fastball at the letters, and Sakic rubber-stamped it.

Depth matters, yes. Top-heavy teams don’t usually have staying power in the NHL postseason, given the physicality and length of series. But from Jack Eichel to Matthew Tkachuk, hockey history tends to frown on teams that swap out star players for OK dudes in bulk.

If the reports are true that the Avs and Rantanen were squabbling over a $500,000 difference in annual salary, then C-Mac and Super Joe might’ve just kissed the rest of MacKinnon’s career peak goodbye. They also might’ve set a proud franchise back half a decade.

Meanwhile, Dallas rescued Rantanen from Carolina and inked the Moose to an eight-year deal for money that, starting next season ($12 million), the Avs probably could’ve found room for. All while extending Makar.

The Stars won the Mikko trade, which should never have happened. In MacFarland’s defense, once he abandoned an extension, the Avs GM sent Moose as far away from the Western Conference as possible. But, MacFarland was asked Tuesday, did he do so with any assurances that the Hurricanes had hammered out a long-term deal with Mikko as part of the process?

“Yeah, I’m not going to comment on the lead-up into the negotiations that we have with the player and his agent,” the GM replied.

Yet here we are. And there he is. For another seven years.

When you break up the band, the music’s never quite the same, is it? It’s why the Blackhawks kept Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews and Duncan Keith together through three Stanley Cups in Chicago.

“You look at where we were in the last few years, we weren’t good enough. We weren’t deep enough,” Sakic continued. “We won in ’22 because we had our stars, but we were also deep. And you can’t win the Stanley Cup without it. And status quo wasn’t good enough.”

True. It still isn’t. Comparisons with the 2022 champs were inevitable — but the deeper you look, the more the ’25 depth chart fell just short.

Nelson proved to be a solid banger, but he’s also never averaged more than 0.83 points per game over any of his nine postseason runs. Nazem Kadri, the bar for modern Avs second-line centers, has topped that mark in his playoff career twice already.

Avs brass faced the music Tuesday, to their credit. But instead of admitting the Rantanen deal was a mistake, they blamed their second first-round exit in three springs on the power play, canned assistant coach Ray Bennett, threw their support behind coach Jared Bednar and vowed to run it back with as many pieces as they can afford.

On that last one, wish them luck. Nelson, Ryan Lindgren, Joel Kiviranta, Erik Johnson and Jonathan Drouin are all slated to become unrestricted free agents this summer. MacFarland’s only got $5.336 million in cap space to play with at the moment, per Puckpedia.com.

“Listen, if you’ve got Cale Makar and Nathan McKinnon, your window’s open,” Sakic said. ” And that’s why it’s important from the management side to when it comes to trade deadlines, you try and do what you can to give them the best opportunity. You’re not going to have those players forever.”

You don’t trade Stars for scrubs. Rantanen’s raking in $12 million from the Stars over each of the next three seasons. The salaries for Necas ($6.5 million), Nelson ($3 million), and Drury ($1.75 million) in ’24-25 totaled $11.25 million.

In the playoffs, you don’t just get what you pay for. You often get what you deserve.

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