Remember last night before the game started when I wrote about how the tea leaves didn’t line up with the story that the Blackhawks were in Denver for most of a week… to watch Aidan Thompson…?
Late last night, Elliotte Friedman at Sportsnet knocked out a quick post about the blockbuster trade with a few thoughts. This portion obviously caught my attention:
The Hurricanes also get Taylor Hall. Chicago legitimately tried to keep him, but this is a winning opportunity in the moment.
The Blackhawks brokered this deal. If Rantanen does hit the market this summer, it wouldnโt be a stunner to see them make a run at him.
This isn’t a surprise to me because, frankly, the Blackhawks have had designs on making a splash this coming summer from the moment they called Connor Bedard‘s name on the stage in Nashville. I heard early in training camp before this season that the Blackhawks were keeping tabs on Mikko Rantanen and Mitch Marner in Toronto. I wrote about it in October of last year just as the 2024-25 season was beginning.
And then I wrote more, focused specifically on Rantanen.
Why? Because Rantanen is the kind of player you take out another mortgage to acquire. And I was hearing there was specific interest in him, both because of the player and because the situation in Denver was more likely to make him a guy who could become available.
I’ve heard from a couple folks since the trade went down that the Blackhawks would absolutely make a strong push for Rantanen (and/or Marner for that matter) this coming summer. And, if Rantanen’s price tag is indeed in the $14M per range as Leon Draisaitl got from Edmonton, the Blackhawks can and should do it.
“But what about all of the young players who need to get paid in the future?” they asked.
I will remind everyone that, at this moment, the Blackhawks have a whopping $10.9M committed to just two forwards for the 2026-27 season — which would be the first year of Bedard’s second contract.
$14M in 2025-26 would fit under the current cap ceiling simply by subtracting Hall ($6M), Alec Martinez ($4M) and Philipp Kurashev ($2.25M) — all of whom would have been off the books anyway. Nevermind that the cap ceiling is expected to go up from $88M to anywhere in the $93-96M range for next year.
$14M in the 2026-27 season would fit under the current cap ceiling simply by subtracting Nick Foligno ($4.5M), Ilya Mikheyev ($4,037,500) and Connor Murphy ($4.4M) — all of whom are UFAs that summer. Nevermind that the Blackhawks also have $7.52M coming off the books from their two veteran goalies after next season as well…. and the ceiling is expected to be around $100M by then.
The point is: the Blackhawks have a lot of prospects and young players who are going to need a second contract soon. The Blackhawks have a lot of good young players and prospects starting to make their moves up thru the organization. Lots of people outside Chicago really like the pipeline general manager Kyle Davidson has collected over the past three years.
But the universal knock on the Blackhawks’ depth right now is that it lacks a second franchise-defining superstar forward.
Will the Blackhawks potentially be able to add a player of that caliber at the top of the 2025 NHL Draft? Sure. Will that player be a ready-made star immediately to start their rookie season as a teenager next year? Probably not. Every young player has growing pains.
Mikko Rantanen is an established, elite, all-around dominant player already in the NHL. And he doesn’t turn 29 until the end of October.
The Blackhawks are trying to line up their options for this coming summer. And getting Rantanen out of Colorado — and more likely to at the very least test the open market on July 1 — is a very good reason to, as Friedman put it, “broker” this deal.