ELMONT, N.Y. — The Hurricanes saw their four-game winning streak end Saturday on Long Island, losing 3-2 in overtime to the Islanders on a goal by Brock Nelson.
But Saturday wasn’t about getting two points in the standings. Instead, Carolina’s 50th game of the season was about emotion — sadness, joy, hope and a spectrum of others — and a new chapter in the franchise’s history.
The box score will read no goals, no assists and no points for Mikko Rantanen and Taylor Hall, the two players — one a current superstar winger, the other a former Hart Trophy winner-turned-hockey nomad — acquired in a blockbuster trade the day before.
The memory has the potential to mean a lot more.
Hall, named the league’s top player in 2018, joins his seventh team Friday in a 900-game career that has seen just 39 of those games come in the playoffs. After six seasons with the Oilers — who drafted him first overall in 2010 — and three-plus with the Devils, Hall has bounced across North America the past half-dozen seasons.
Arizona. Buffalo. Boston. Chicago.
His latest stop is with the Hurricanes, a team that surely hopes to rejuvenate the 33-year-old and make him a piece of a Stanley Cup contender.
When he was reminded that Carolina was his seventh NHL franchise — tied for the second most by a first overall pick with 1992’s Roman Hamrlik and 1986’s Joe Murphy, and two behind 1979 top pick Rob Ramage’s nine teams — you could, for a second, see the wear and tear that each of those stops have had on Hall. Every other No. 1 pick since Hall was drafted by Edmonton has stayed with the team that selected them with one exception — fellow Oilers’ top pick Nail Yakupov.
“I’d love for this to be the last,” he said after the loss to the Islanders. “I’m tired of moving around.”
Hall, who said he had been preparing for his move to Carolina for a couple of days, had to wait patiently as the other jigsaw piece in GM Eric Tulsky’s reimagining of the franchise fell into place.
“I found out why it was taking so long,” Hall said, gesturing toward Rantanen, “and — totally understandable.”
While Hall’s emotions seemingly ranged from relieved to resigned, Rantanen was still in shock.
“Not a lot of sleep, a lot of emotions going through because it was 10 years in Colorado,” Rantanen said of the last 24 hours that saw him traded away by the team that had drafted and the only for which he’s played. “So it was a long time, and so maybe that’s the hardest.”
Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour can empathize with Rantanen. During his playing days, the coach was traded from Philadelphia, where he was a fan favorite, to Carolina in 2000.
“It’s a whirlwind when you get traded,” said Brind’Amour, “especially when you’ve been somewhere a long time.”
The Rantanen/Hall trade, which sent Martin Necas, Jack Drury and draft picks to Colorado and Chicago, came 25 years and one day after the Hurricanes made the blockbuster Brind’Amour swap.
That deal led to a Stanley Cup in 2006 and delivered the team’s record-breaking coach to his current position. Brind’Amour has spoken about how difficult that trade was, arriving in Raleigh during a rare snowstorm with one suit and a hotel key.
The snow from last week’s storm had melted by the time the ink was dry on the Rantanen trade Friday, but the 28-year-old Finn is undoubtedly feeling many of the same emotions Brind’Amour did a quarter-century ago.
“I really want to just think about the future now,” Rantanen said Saturday night, wearing an unfamiliar lava red T-shirt. “It’s behind us, and it’s a raw business in the NHL, and sometimes it goes like this. But yeah, I think it’s going to hit in a little bit. It hasn’t maybe hit yet.”
While Rantanen wrestles with what this next phase of his career means for his personal and professional life, Hurricanes fans are overcome with joy at the team landing him and brimming with cautious optimism that Tulsky, Tom Dundon and the Carolina front office can be more successful in contract extension talks than Colorado had been.
That made Saturday, an overtime loss in the standings that included a blown third period lead and failed overtime that ironically missed Necas, mostly an afterthought.
But the day has the potential to mean a whole lot more. For Hall. For Rantanen. For Brind’Amour. For Tulsky and Dundon. For the Hurricanes’ fans.
“Sometimes,” Tulsky said in the hours before Saturday’s game, “you have to do things that you aren’t comfortable with.”
Discomfort, shock, sadness, relief, exasperation, joy, hope and more were all displayed Saturday. The score on Jan. 25, 2025, will be forgotten. Everything else that happened in the 24 hours leading up to it has the potential to be remembered forever.
