The Carolina Hurricanes have had the trade winds blowing all season, and General Manager Eric Tulsky has been in the middle of it all. 

He sent shockwaves around the hockey world by trading for right winger Mikko Rantanen from the Colorado Avalanche in January, a situation that quickly boiled over into another trade, shipping Rantanen to the Dallas Stars on NHL Trade Deadline Day after the Finnish forward refused to sign long-term in Raleigh. 

Combining the two trades, Carolina ended up surrendering centers Martin Necas and Jack Drury and fourth-round picks in the 2025 and 2026 NHL Entry Drafts while bringing in center Logan Stankoven, left-winger Taylor Hall and first-round picks in 2026 and 2027, as well as smaller pieces. 

Rantanen played 13 games for the Hurricanes between the trades, scoring two goals and four assists. 

On Tuesday, Carolina General Manager Eric Tulsky joined Daily Faceoff’s Jeff Marek on The Sheet to break down how things went down with Rantanen, the blockbuster trades and where the Hurricanes are heading into the final stretches of the 2024-25 season.

Marek: “We’ll start sort of reverse pyramid here; a general thought on what happened before we get into specifics. What, from your chair, do you think people need to understand that perhaps they don’t?”

Tulsky: “Big picture, we want to be aggressive. We want to take swings. We had a chance to acquire the kind of player you can’t normally get your hands on, so we took our shot. We knew he was not going to sign an extension the day we traded for him. We had reason to believe that maybe we were right, or maybe we were wrong, but we had reason to believe we had a decent chance of getting it done. He came in; he decided it wasn’t for him and that’s been pretty rare for us. We had time to move on and still end up okay with a player we’re really happy with.”

Marek: “I don’t know that I’ve heard someone specifically say, ‘I want out of Carolina, I don’t want to be here.’ That’s why this sort of story that’s popped up here kind of rings a little bit hollow to me, Eric.”

Tulsky: “We’ve had to let a lot of people go because we’ve had a really good team, and the salary cap makes it hard to keep everyone. But I don’t know that we’ve had anybody who wanted to leave unless it was somebody who felt like they were blocked. That happens occasionally, but even then, not very often. For the most part, guys who are here want to be here. 

“We talked about Slavin earlier. He just signed a long-term extension at a number designed to help us keep building around him. We’ve had people do that because they like it here, and they want to be part of it, and they want to help us.

“It’s a personal thing. Every individual makes their own choice, and some people like the bustle of Canada, some people like warmer weather and climates, and some people like small towns where they can raise a family. Some people want an urban metropolis. Whatever reasons he had for deciding this wasn’t the fit for him, that’s okay, but no, it’s not something that happens all the time. 

“People keep connecting it to [Jake] Guentzel. A very similar situation in one way – we traded for him knowing he wouldn’t sign an extension the day we traded for him because he had been with one team his whole career – that was where his mind was. He didn’t have his head around signing anywhere else right away. He came in, he got to know us, and he really liked it. He wanted to be here, and that’s what happens most of the time, but we couldn’t get that one done because we had salary cap issues. 

“We had a couple of big-name free agents coming up, and we were really tight against it, and we needed some time to figure out what we actually had available. Obviously, in retrospect, it would have been great just to get that one done and figure out the other stuff, but we were trying to fit everything and trying to make the team as good as we could.”

Catch the whole conversation between Marek and Tulsky on The Sheet.

Failed to load video.