Right after Mikko Rantanen completed his natural hat trick en route to a 3-2 Stars win in their series opener in Winnipeg, Stars GM Jim Nill could've been forgiven for breaking out the slip 'n' slide goal celebration. It would have been ill-advised; suite carpeting burns something fierce. But this, in Dallas's wildest dreams and the worst nightmares of the two teams who previously employed him this season, is why the Stars bet the farm and mortgaged a few drafts to lock up the 28-year-old Finn for most of the next decade. At that moment, the winger was decidedly on a heater. Six of the last seven Stars goals, dating back to Game 7 against Colorado, had come off Rantanen's stick. Six of eight scored by anybody, on either team, were his. He racked up his consecutive hat tricks in just 14:53 of ice time. It is possible no one has even been hotter.
"The chance to acquire and extend one of the best forwards in the NHL is an opportunity that we couldn’t pass up," Nill said at the time, and while it's boilerplate front-officespeak, truisms don't get to be truisms without being, you know, true. Superstars don't come available often in this league, not in their primes, not in a league that sometimes seems designed to deny us the drama of player movement. And superstars win games. Rantanen proved the difference between Dallas going home in the first round and beating the Avs—and, for the Avs, not having him was the reason they're booking tee times. Now he's got the Stars up a game, solving home-ice Connor Hellebuyck thrice.
None of the three were particularly sexy skill goals. The first was a cleaned-up rebound, poked home with one arm as he fell. The second was a classic redirect. The third took a happy deflection off a Jet. Anyone could have scored those; they don't require Rantanen's big body or quick release. Anyone didn't score them, though. He did, because sometimes when it rains goals it pours, and all you can do in the torrent is put yourself in the right place to be the lightning rod. Don't think his teammates aren't hyperaware of where No. 96 is at all times. "He’s just on fire right now," said center Sam Steel, thoughtlessly ruining my extended storm metaphor, "so we’re just trying to get him the puck."
Rantanen is just the third player in NHL history to score hat tricks in consecutive playoff games, the first since Jari Kurri in 1985. He's the only player ever to have factored in 12 straight team goals in the postseason. Ostensibly, his unreal scoring streak is not the reason why he's double-shifting—coach Pete DeBoer said Rantanen was used to playing heavier minutes in Colorado, so rolling him on the first and fourth lines in Dallas is just a way to get him back near his preferred usage. But when a dude's got eight goals and six assists in four games, you feed the beast. "Let's see how long he can run this for. He's rolling. He's feeling it," DeBoer said.
It makes a kind of bloodless sense why the Avalanche moved on from Rantanen in his walk year, sending him to the Hurricanes in a shock January deal. He wanted both money and term, and believed (rightly) that he would get it, and the way they're constructed, Colorado was not prepared to offer him what he sought. It was also obliquely logical that the Canes would jump at the chance to trade for him without first having secured an extension: Whatever happened in Carolina is still a nebulous bit of he-said/they-said, but I'm never going to ding a team for getting a superstar when he's available and trusting the rest to be worked out later. Both the 'Lanche and Canes did pretty good in their respective trade hauls when they decided they didn't want to let Rantanen walk for nothing, and it's not always true that the team that gets the best player wins the deal. But, man. If I'm an Avs fan, I'm still losing sleep knowing that best player was the difference in my team's season (and maybe still sobbing over his handshake with Gabe Landeskog), and if I'm a Hurricanes fan, I'm sweating over the possibility of a Final against him. The math is even simpler than $96 million: Superstars win games, and games win series, and those decide Cups.
