Mikko Rantanen Straight Up Told The Carolina Hurricanes "There's Four Teams I'll Go Play For, You're Not One Of Them"
If you think about it, there's really not much difference between hitting a massive home run or taking a gigantic swing-and-a-miss. In each scenario, you swing as hard as you possibly can with the goal in mind that you're sending the ball 450 feet out into the crowd. The only difference, of course, is whether or not you make contact with the ball.
The Carolina Hurricanes were swinging for the fences back in January. They were ready to make a move that immediately put them in the driver's seat to be the Stanley Cup favorites coming out of the Eastern Conference. Nobody saw this trade coming, which probably should have been the first red flag when it initially went down. But the Hurricanes swung out of their shoes anyway by trading Martin Necas and Jack Drury to Colorado Avalanche for Mikko Rantanen. They didn't realize until he got in the building that Mikko Rantanen threw a nasty curve at them when he said, "there's four teams that I'll go play for, you're not one of them".
For anyone who doesn't speak Finnish, that roughly translates to "get fucked, losers".
Now the thought is that Carolina should have done their due diligence to find this information out before making the trade. Which, in hindsight, certainly sounds like it makes sense. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt here and say it's a crazy move that Rantanen only had 4 teams on his short list, and that most teams wouldn't think to prepare for that scenario. The Hurricanes weren't on Rantanen's no-trade list, they are a competitive team, they have a bunch of other Finnish players, and they had plenty of cap space to work with. It seemed like everything could have worked out there until, again, Rantanen told them to go fuck themselves.
That's a tough one to bounce back from. Seemingly impossible to pick yourself off the floor after the way that scenario played out. Don't get me wrong, the Hurricanes still managed to get a haul out of all of it. At the end of the day, they effectively traded Martin Necas and Jack Drury for Logan Stankoven and two 1st round picks. But when you go all in on Mikko Rantanen pushing you over the top to win a Stanley Cup this year, to thinking to yourself about how good your team can be a few years from now? Well that's like taking a chick home from the bar and then realizing she was an NCAA National Champion swimmer from Penn.
P.S. -- You have to imagine Rod Brind'Amour didn't appreciate Hurricanes management making him out to feel like a fool during this entire saga. Get Brind'Amour out of Carolina and back home to Philadelphia where he belongs.