Two Haunting (and Probably Irrational) Concerns about the 2025-26 Dallas Stars

It is early, though

It’s Halloween (or Hallowe’en¹ if you prefer), and that means it’s time for hackneyed articles purporting to scare you.

But as every Very Brave Grown-Up knows, there is a big difference between scary, and scary. The things manufactured to jump-start your system with adrenaline, triggering a momentary panic response, are all well and good, when consumed knowingly and at an appropriate age. (Did anyone else here have persistent nightmares about alligators, growing up, or was that just me?)

The truly alarming things, however, have more of a slow burn. The stuff that really worries you isn’t so kind as to get all its terror out in the open at once. Instead, it seeps in gradually and stays with you like wet socks at an amusement park. Real terror doesn’t sting; it pervades.

Anyway, this is a Hockey Web Site on the Internet, or something like it. So rather than dive too deeply into the literature of the unsettling, let’s just drag some of those creeping fears out into the light. Because there’s no better way to handle anxiety than to name it and face it. Sometimes, it even helps! Sometimes.

Fear #1: What If Colorado Was Right?

Put simply: What if Mikko Rantanen doesn’t turn out to be what the Stars signed him to be? What if Martin Nečas ends up being a more than adequate replacement in Colorado, while Dallas ends up paying for past performance as Rantanen enters his thirties?

Maybe this is an easy fear to dismiss, given how Mikko Rantanen forever traumatized the team that traded him last January by almost singlehandedly eliminating them in Game 7 and dragging the Stars into the second round—which he also jump-started with his second hat trick in as many contest, in Game 1 against Winnipeg.

But that’s why we call these things fears, not necessarily logical deductions.

Now, the Stars are absolutely and completely in the Avs’ heads, and have been for a while. That’s what happens when two players the Avs have successfully demonized in Matt Duchene and Rantanen get the last laugh, five years after Joel Kiviranta did the same in the bubble.

Sure, the Avalanche are flashy, loaded with two of the best players in the league, offensively terrifying, and able to boast a Stanley Cup from 2022. They should feel perfectly secure, given all those things. You can’t win it all every year, right?

Here’s the thing though: Colorado fans absolutely feel like they should win it all every year, because that narrative has been successfully perpetuated by the team itself, which has largely convinced its fan base that actually, Mikko Rantanen traded himself out of town in January, despite well-sourced national reporters like Pierre LeBrun consistently saying the opposite.

Rantanen was willing to come down from $14 million to stay in Denver, and in fact he was hoping and expecting to do so, until the Avs shocked him and his agent by shipping him to Carolina over a month before the trade deadline without anything close to real warning to him or Nate MacKinnon or anyone else. As MacKinnon said there, even he was assuming that negotiations would go up to the end, as they did with Gabriel Landeskog. By all accounts, Rantanen was expecting the same.

To buttress that, here are excerpts from two LeBruns stories on the trade, from The Athletic:

Pierre LeBrun, The Athletic

And again, just to reiterate:

Pierre LeBrun, The Athletic

All that to say, this was very much the Avalanche making the call, for reasons they haven’t cared to share with anyone. But if you’ve stomached even a minute of an Altitude broadcast, you know that this is not an organization that cares about even-handed, objective viewpoints. They want to control the narrative, and that means that Rantanen had to be the bad guy here.