I am so glad that us fans are not GMs or we don't have some sort of public ownership model like you see with some lower tier soccer/football clubs in Europe.
The neck snapping pace of changing opinions.. whew
The Twitter quote above is very true. The talking heads need us to trade him way more than we need to trade him.. they need to stir up the market because they blew it the first time around on the initial trade to us... they had zero milking of things leading up to Rantanen being traded here. They missed it entirely. They need us to trade him way more than we need to trade him so there is something to talk about on their wall to wall coverage tomorrow..
Of course our GM is calling all teams to see if he can swindle someone and get a better package than we have right now. That's what we do alllllllll the time. How many times does Tulsky have to say it before we believe him that they never want to miss any opportunity. If a contentibg team is so desperate to go "all in" this season that they give us such a crazy return that we can't deny then mayyyyyybe we see him traded by tomorrow.. getting a crazy package back of maybe more settled and controllable assets compared to a pending UFA might be a possibility to entice Tulsky to deal.
But if not, then we are no different than when we first made the trade. We willingly made the trade knowing he was a pending UFA and had to sell him on the team and if nothing else we would get a playoff run out of him versus one extra year of eligibility of Necas. Could be a big win could just be a deadline splash done early.
Nothing has changed and no one is reporting that Rantenan has told us he will not sign with us no matter what. Just that a signing likely won't happen before trade deadline.
Unless a team is desperate to add that they will overpay to an extreme and have the assets to do that while still not harming their current year team that they are trying to add to, then we likely can get similar return closer to July 1 for a sign and trade ala Tkachuk to Florida a few seasons ago. Rantanen will still want max dollars and we will be the only one that can offer the 8th year to max out his money. When we are talking the kind of money he wants, he needs the 8th year to help spread the money out as 7 years makes the AAV less manageable...
So unless we get to abuse someone in an overpay trade scenario like we are constantly trying to do every day to find deals, then I expect we have Rantanen for the playoffs and we revisit later.
And all the talking heads that have agendas and are desperate for any kind of story for deadline day can keep spouting their nonsense and trying to do their own version of tampering for other teams or to just self promote. I'll believe it when I see the trade officially done this week.