'We Never Want To Miss An Opportunity To Make The Team Better': Carolina GM Eric Tulsky On Blockbuster Trade

The Carolina Hurricanes pulled off one of the biggest trades in recent memory last night, landing Mikko Rantanen and Taylor Hall in a three-team trade that saw Martin Necas and Jack Drury heading the other way.

Today, Carolina general manager Eric Tulsky spoke with the media about the trade. Here's what he had to say:

Eric Tulsky

On what makes Mikko Rantanen a good fit in Carolina: He's a fantastic fit for the way we play. We play a system that has us battling for pucks along the walls and trying to make plays at the net-front and he's just one of the best in the league at some of those things. A lot of the identity of our team right now comes from the way Jordan [Staal] plays and the way he sort of carries play with his heaviness and his strength and Mikko can do all of that but with really high-level skill to go with it. I don't think there's any question that he's going to be a tremendous fit on the ice and I've heard nothing but great things off the ice. 

On if the deal's success hinges on having success this season or getting Rantanen signed to an extension: As far as the success of the deal, he's a fantastic player and we expect him to change our team and make us better. That's what we get judged by. How far the team goes and what happens from there remains to be seen. Obviously we hope it works out in both ways, but the first step is getting on the ice tonight and seeing him go to work.

On the timeline for the deal: We've been floating concepts all the way back to the summer. I would say we've been trading serious offers for six or eight weeks now and have been really down to brass tacks grinding and trying to finish it for about two weeks. In terms of the timing, we wanted to get him as early as we could. We wanted to have as much time with him on our team as possible and we wanted to have the opportunity to have him work with us, help us, help us win games, fit in and feel like he's part of the family and the earlier we can do that, the better.

On if the team would consider using Rantanen at center: I'm going to defer to Rod [Brind'Amour] on how he's going to arrange his roster. Mikko has shown that he can take faceoffs and that he can play center. That gives Rod a lot of flexibility for how he wants to set things up. Ultimately, it's up to him to figure out what he thinks is best on any given night.

On how this deal may affect other negotiations he's been having with other teams: That was part of what happened in the last week. As we started to feel like teams needed to make a decision, that meant we needed everybody to get their best offers on the table and it was both on our side and on our counterparties side. Everybody had multiple offers that they needed to weigh and decide where they wanted to go and so it was just sort of time for everyone to figure out what they wanted to do and this deal got done. I'm not sure what's going to happen with other teams obviously, but it was a complicated dance.

On if the team has had any discussions with Rantanen's camp yet on a contract extension: Of course we've talked with the agent. It's very preliminary, first conversations. It's a big deal and it will take a bit of time just like the trade did. So we're getting to work on it as early as we can. But part of it too is that he needs to spend a little bit of time getting to know us and making sure he likes the city, likes the team, likes the coach, likes the players. So that will happen over the next days, weeks, whatever. We will be talking with the agent throughout, but I wouldn't expect him to sign away the next six or seven or eight years of his life without knowing what he was getting into. So we have that opportunity and that's part of what doing it early buys. The chance for everybody to understand the relationship before we commit to anything. Of course we would love to get it done and we will be working on that.

On Rantanen's playoff potential: Having someone with his size and strength as the game gets more physical and more intense is obviously beneficial. He's had playoff success. Of course that's something you always want to get the opportunity to bring in when you can. But he's one of the best players in the league, right? He's good at a lot of things and playoffs is one of them.

On if this will be the biggest splash the team will make: Look, there are not many trades in a year that are bigger than Mikko Rantanen changing teams. So I think the safe bet would be on this being the biggest deal we will make this year, but we try to be very active. We came into this year with not very much cap space and we've worked very hard with our roster to build up what we could to have the opportunity to take advantage of something like this if it came along. We feel fortunate that we were in that position with both the flexibility to do it and the assets to interest the other team. Those assets were really valuable. I understand that the media's focus is on what a great player we got, but I don't want to diminish what we gave up. Marty Necas is a great player who might go there and have 80 or 90 or 100 points. Jack Drury is a great player who's going to go there and be a big part of their team and a fantastic part of their locker room. Those are really hard pieces to give up and we didn't do it lightly, but when you have an opportunity to acquire a player like this, sometimes you just have to stretch.

On if Jesperi Kotkaniemi was originally part of trade discussions: I don't really want to get into the names of players who where not in the deal, but I will say there were six months of conversations with no leaks at all and then a deal happens and a lot of things start coming out that were not necessarily part of what happened.

On what he feels the team is gaining/losing as part of the entire trade package: So Taylor's an important piece too. It's understandable that the focus will be on Mikko because of his stature in the league, but Taylor is a huge piece too and ultimately one of the things that we felt our team could stand to have was a little bit of an upgrade on skill and offensive punch. Now Marty is one of the most skilled players in the league, so if he's going, it's not easy to upgrade the skill level, but Mikko is an incredible offensive force and Taylor brings a lot of skill and some size and some speed and we think he's going to fit and help upgrade our scoring punch also.

On when Taylor Hall became a part of the deal: It as another player from early in the year that we had our eyes on as somebody who might be available at some point and might be an option to help upgrade our skill level. So we had conversations with them and they were not ready to move him early of course, but they got to a point where they started to think about it and it was about around the same time that this deal started to really get down to details. So I started to think of ways to combine the two and make it work for both.

On William Carrier's status: I'm not ready to comment on his timeline right now. I don't know that it's possible to replace him. Just like what I said about Jordan and Mikko in terms of being the prototypical Hurricanes forward. Will was designed in a lab to play on Rod's team. So I don't think we're going to find that anywhere else. I don't think there is a replacement. Having him out is a loss and we will be missing him for a little while. I expect he will be back at some point and hopefully that's soon.

On if he thinks the Jake Guentzel situation last year will help how the team approaches Rantanen's extension this time: I understand the tendency to compare the two. There are obvious similarities. At the same time, our team situation is totally different right now. So last year, if you took what we exited the year with and what those players ended up signing for, if we tried to keep all of them, we would have been about $20 million over the cap. So trying to figure out how you stretch on a player when your roster is $20 million over the cap is hard. As things stand today, depending on where next year's cap is, we have about $35 or $40 million of cap space next year. So it's a different kind of conversation. We don't feel nearly as constrained. Instead, the question is, how many more good pieces can we add? You never want to just waste the space because we want to be able to add another player and another player after that, but the same constraints aren't there with this year's roster.

On if the team feels their cap space situation gives them an edge in being able to retain Rantanen: He's an incredible player and if he gets to free agency, I'm sure there will be teams that will pay him a lot of money. So our job in the next weeks and months is to make it so that he wants to be here. Because he has the right as a free agent to decide where to sign and it may not come down to money for him. It may come down to where he wants to be and so our goal is make him want to be here. And then offer him enough money that he doesn't have to think twice about it. So that's sort of how I'm thinking about it. That being said, of course the conversations start right away, but really at this point it's more about a recruiting pitch than a negotiation in my mind.

On the fanbase's reaction: Ultimately I have to do what's right for the team. The fans, on the day a move happens, are going to have opinions based on their feelings about the players they've had and the players they're getting. In the long run, their opinions will depend on the team's success and it's my job to keep my eye on that. That being said, these guys are homegrown parts of the core who were a big part of our team culture and that has an impact and that is something I have to weigh. I know every player in that room was sad to lose those two guys. That's hard and you have to consider that and you don't do it lightly. But again, when you have the chance to get a player who can come in and change your team, sometimes you have to do things that aren't comfortable.

On if Rantanen's history/friendship with Sebastian Aho played a part in persuing deal: Ultimately, we have a lot of really good people on our team and I have confidence that people who come in are going to make friends and fit in and feel good about our personalities. It's nice if there's already a friend there, but they'll make friends fast. It's a close-knit group. My focus is really on finding people who I think are good people so that they will fit in well and on players who I think will fit in the way we play so that they feel good about their results on the ice and feel good about their opportunities and feel like we put them in positions to show their best performance. And if we do all that, then they'll get along with people, they'll make friends. Of course I'm sure Sebastian was happy to see his friend come in, but if we had instead found a different superstar who he didn't happen to be friends with, he would have been okay with that too. 

On getting more comfortable in the position of general manager: Of course anybody new at their job is learning. I've still only been on this job for seven months, so I haven't even been through a trade deadline yet. There's a lot for me to go through still and my first time through everything is going to be different from my second time or my third time. That being said, I've had a lot of experience working with the front office as we've gone through these things and I have a lot of really talented people helping me. So I feel comfortable in our abilities to manage these things, but of course it's going to be different the second time through. 

On if he signed Martin Necas to a two-year deal intending to use him as trade capital: So no would be my answer. Ultimately, he elected for arbitration so we were going to have the right to choose one year or two and so as we negotiated he understood that we could pick one year or two in arb, so it made sense also to talk about one and two year contracts. My instinct was that he had a lot of potential and might have a fantastic season and that we would be glad to get the second year under contract instead of only doing one year and then having to re-sign him. We did the two-year deal and he got off to a fantastic start and I was really glad we had done that because that second year was a lot cheaper now than it could have been.

On not trading the team's first-round pick: We're always open to everything. I think our core mantra as a franchise is that we never want to miss an opportunity to make the team better. So if the package of assets going back had looked different, we would have been happy to put two first-round picks in, but when we're giving up two really fantastic players, then we didn't have to put in as many futures into the deal. Honestly, I might have preferred it the other way, but Colorado is a contender too and they needed current pieces if they were giving up a player like Mikko. So ultimately, nothing is ever off the table, it's just a question of what the opportunity is and when is it the right value to put a piece in.

On if it was a priority for the team to not trade away any of their top prospects : Again, we could have done a very different deal where it was centered on a lot of futures and I would have been thrilled with that because our current team would have been much better. If we were trading with a team that was in a different position than Colorado, then that probably would have been what the deal would have looked like. This was a rare case where a team that was moving a pending free agent was also a contender, so they wanted current roster pieces back that could help them this year too. So that's why we ended up with a deal that didn't have that much in terms of futures in it. Because they weren't in a position to trade a star player for futures. They wanted pieces that could help them this year and next.

On if addressing the center position is a priority for the team: Look, we always want to get better and until we have the 20 best players in the league all on one team, there's always ways you can get better. We did lose an important part of our center group. As was mentioned, Mikko might be able to play center for us if that's where Rod sees him, so we might have actually gotten stronger at center if that's what ends up happening. So to some degree, we need to see how things play out, but you're right. If Mikko ends up playing at wing, then our center depth did get a little bit thinned out and we need to think about whether there are opportunities to help repair it a little bit.

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