Culture
NHL trade deadline winners and losers: Mikko Rantanen, Brad Marchand reshape Stanley Cup race
What the 2025 NHL trade deadline lacked in quantity, it made up for in quality. After all, it’s not often we have a prolonged drama like the Mikko Rantanen saga, which took several twists and turns before ending deep in the heart of Texas. And the Panthers’ stunning acquisition of Brad Marchand is one of the great buzzer-beaters in deadline history.
GO DEEPER
NHL trade deadline: Grading every deal completed this trade season
Now that the dust has settled — and knowing full well that the true winners and losers won’t be known until mid-June — let’s take a look at who improved the most, who took the biggest chances and who fell flat on their face on deadline day.
Winner: Florida Panthers
Imagine going up against a line with both Brad Marchand and Matthew Tkachuk on it. Good luck with that. Panthers GM Bill Zito made the most of the cap space Tkachuk’s groin injury opened up, snagging Marchand at the very last minute after adding Seth Jones earlier in the week.
Marchand might not be the 100-point player he was six years ago, but he’s still an excellent all-around player and one of the game’s all-time great pests. You can count on The Rat being showered with fake rats after a big win in South Florida at some point this spring. Both Marchand and Tkachuk are hurt right now, but both are expected back for the postseason, which is all that matters in Florida. And while Jones was overpaid as the Blackhawks’ No. 1 defenseman, he can be an outstanding No. 3 in Florida (and potential No. 2 going forward as Aaron Ekblad hits unrestricted free agency this summer), and at a more manageable $7 million cap hit with Chicago retaining $2.5 million for the next five seasons.
Winner: Mikko Rantanen
Rantanen was a member of the Carolina Hurricanes for about six weeks. He spent his first week on the road. He spent the next two weeks with Team Finland in Montreal and Boston. He had all of six home games in Raleigh. It’s entirely reasonable that he wasn’t ready to commit the next eight years of his life to a franchise and a city he barely knows. And that he was pushing for a nine-figure deal, complicating matters further.
Then Rantanen went and signed an eight-year deal with Dallas, a team for which he’s never played, a city in which he’s never lived. And for $96 million, less than Carolina reportedly offered. As if there were any doubt that teams in tax-free states had an inherent advantage over the rest of the league.
Rantanen had total control of his situation, so he must be happy with the deal or it wouldn’t have happened. While it would have been fun to see what someone like Rantanen could have gotten on the open market — players like him so rarely get to that point — he’s joining one of the best and best-run teams in the league, and he’s earning generational wealth to do so. How could you look at that as anything but a win?
Winner: Dallas Stars
Jim Nill has painted himself into something of a corner, handing $96 million to Rantanen with Tyler Seguin coming off long-term injured reserve (LTIR) and Jason Robertson, Wyatt Johnston and Thomas Harley all due significant raises in the next two years. Then there’s captain Jamie Benn, who is a pending unrestricted free agent. Whatever. He’ll get to that eventually, and given Nill’s history, he’ll surely make it all work. What matters is that this is now the Stanley Cup favorite, the best team in the NHL. Getting Rantanen — at significantly less than he’d get on the open market — is a massive coup for the Stars. The NHL’s center of gravity continues to shift south.
Loser: Carolina Hurricanes
There’s no spinning this as a positive for the Hurricanes. GM Eric Tulsky did well enough to salvage something tangible out of it — and if you go all the way back to the initial deal with Colorado, it might even be a net gain — but it’s a bad beat all the same. The Hurricanes gave up a premium talent with another year on a team-friendly contract in Martin Necas to acquire Rantanen, got 13 measly games out of him (won only seven of them), and then flipped him to Dallas for Logan Stankoven and two late first-round picks. Stankoven is an exciting young player, but will he even be at Necas’ level, let alone Rantanen’s? The fact is, this might have been Carolina’s best chance to break through in a wide-open Eastern Conference. Instead, they’re further from contention than they’ve been in years.
The Hurricanes broke from team tradition last year by getting Jake Guentzel as a rental, only to watch him leave for Tampa (another team in a tax-free state!). That apparently spooked Carolina enough that Rantanen’s ambivalence about Raleigh as a long-term home prompted this rather drastic course of action. It’s a shame. Rantanen’s production was subpar (six points in 13 games), but he was generating a massive amount of scoring chances. The goals were going to come, and Rantanen is a monster in the playoffs. Carolina could have gone for it, consequences be damned. Instead, the Hurricanes hedged and were left trying to make the best of a bad situation.
Winner: Mitch Marner
With Rantanen off the board, guess who’s the belle of the ball this summer in free agency? Get that bag, Mitch.
Winner: Colorado Avalanche
The trade deadline is typically an imperfect tool for filing holes, with teams scrambling and often settling to add something, anything, as the clock ticks down. There’s rarely a perfect fit out there for a team, and it’s even more rare for such a trade to happen. But Brock Nelson was the perfect fit for the Avalanche, giving them the second-line center they so clearly needed.
The price was high (a first-rounder and top prospect Calum Ritchie), and the Islanders can feel just as good about this deal as Colorado can. But the Avalanche can win the Stanley Cup this season. Nelson makes them that much better. Swapping Casey Mittelstadt for Charlie Coyle only helps. You won’t hear anyone complaining about the Avalanche’s lack of centers anymore.
Loser: Colorado Avalanche
Eight years, $96 million for Rantanen? That’s pretty much what the Avalanche reportedly offered him before they sent him to Carolina. There’s the tax-free aspect, obviously, but if Rantanen never wanted to leave and Colorado was willing to hit the same number, that initial trade to Carolina looks premature in hindsight.
Winnipeg made a tiny step forward today, adding sensible depth players in Brandon Tanev and Luke Schenn.
But the West shifted wildly under Winnipeg’s feet. A tiny step forward was a big step back. A week that began with the Jets as division favourites ends in disappointment.
— Murat Ates (@WPGMurat) March 7, 2025
Winner: Chicago Blackhawks
Trading Jones makes the Blackhawks worse; there’s no way around that fact. Yet again, it could get even worse before it gets better in Chicago. But Spencer Knight’s 41-save debut has Chicago fans feeling hope for the first time since the 2023 draft lottery, and it’s an undeniable victory for Kyle Davidson to only have to retain $2.5 million on Jones’ contract for the next five seasons.
With Jones forcing the issue and Chicago having no leverage, it seemed like a cap dump for futures with high retention was all the Blackhawks could hope for. Instead, they got a potential No. 1 goalie and a first-rounder, without an onerous retention. Unloading Petr Mrázek and landing a young, controllable, former first-rounder in Joe Veleno is a nice bonus that not only moves out a bad contract but averts an awkward three-goalie situation. Nice work by Davidson.
Loser: Chicago Blackhawks
Davidson, flush with cap space and desperate for a difference-maker up front, had his eye on Rantanen as an ideal linemate for Connor Bedard. Now that Rantanen is off the board, Davidson can only hope that Toronto doesn’t strike a deal with Marner — and that Marner’s up for a fixer-upper.
Winner: Tampa Bay Lightning
Some day, there will be a reckoning for Julien BriseBois and the Lightning, a day on which all their core players suddenly are tumbling down the aging curve and the cupboard is completely bare. But that day is not today.
Tampa has won 10 of its last 11 games and has muscled its way back into the true contender tier of the NHL. And when you have a chance to win, you go for it. BriseBois’ utter disregard for draft picks is almost comical at this point — Tampa has had one first-round pick in the last five drafts and has dealt away its 2025, 2026 and 2027 first-rounders (the last two with top-10 protection) — but it’s also absolutely the right attitude for a perennial contender.
Neither Yanni Gourde nor Oliver Bjorkstrand is a franchise-changing needle-mover, but the Lightning know as well as anybody that it’s those second-tier depth additions that often make the difference in the postseason.
Every hockey fan should want their team’s GM to think this way.
Loser: Buffalo Sabres
As they hurtle toward a 14th straight spring without a playoff appearance, the Sabres had to do something. And they did something. But they did something that doesn’t really change anything.
At best, swapping Dylan Cozens (and depth defenseman Dennis Gilbert) for Josh Norris (and depth defenseman Jacob Bernard-Docker) is a wash. At worst, it’s selling low on a player with a very high ceiling. That the Sabres sent a second-rounder to Ottawa for the privilege is baffling.
Instead of getting aggressive and truly remaking a talented but continually underperforming roster by dealing away the likes of Jason Zucker or even Alex Tuch, the Sabres are stuck running in place. And that place is last.
They are in the same position after the trade deadline as they were before the trade deadline — lost.
Winner: Toronto Maple Leafs
The Leafs didn’t have the splashiest deadline — at one point in the day, while chaos swirled, you wanted to poke Brad Treliving with a stick and see if he was still awake. But Scott Laughton and Brandon Carlo are sneaky good gets who make Toronto a better defensive team, first and foremost.
Laughton’s certainly an upgrade over Max Domi, who can shift to the wing. With the Flyers retaining half of Laughton’s salary, the Leafs get a reliable two-way, third-line center for two playoff runs at just a $1.5 million cap hit. And it didn’t cost them any of their top prospects or young players. Even the 2027 first-rounder is top-10 protected.
Laughton is good on the ice and great in the room. It’s not the most exciting move, but for a team that’s been done in by its lack of forward depth in previous postseasons, it’s a savvy one.
Loser: Vancouver Canucks
It sounds like there could be progress toward a Brock Boeser extension, but what are these Canucks? They’re not going for it, having traded J.T. Miller away earlier in the season and Carson Soucy to the Rangers for a third-rounder at the deadline. They’re not retooling, having held on to Boeser and Elias Pettersson. Their captain and best player is hurt, they’re on the periphery of the playoffs, and they seem to be going nowhere slowly.
Winner: San Jose Sharks
For absolutely nothing, Sharks GM Mike Grier got 50 solid games from Jake Walman, a second-round pick (from Detroit as a cap-dump sweetener last summer) and a first-round pick (from Edmonton for Walman on Thursday). Steve Yzerman could never.
Loser: Edmonton Oilers
Dallas went out and added the best player available in Rantanen and locked him up long-term. Colorado went out and added the top rental available in Nelson. Edmonton added a solid second-pair defenseman in Walman and a third-line forward in Trent Frederic. If this is an arms race, Edmonton is losing. The Oilers are the defending conference champion and were the preseason favorites to win it all. Now, they look like the fifth-best team in the West. It’s foolish to ever doubt Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid, but the Oilers have an uphill climb to get back to the Final.
(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Bill Wippert, Mike Stobe, Josh Lavellee / Getty Images)
Welcome to Literary Quotable Quotes, a quiz that tests your recognition of classic lines. This week’s installment celebrates lines from popular crime novels. (As a hint, the correct books are all “firsts” in one category or another.) In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the novels if you’re intrigued and inspired to read more.
Xia De-hong, who survived persecution and torture as an official in Mao Zedong’s China and was later the central figure in her daughter’s best-selling 1991 memoir, “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China,” died on April 15 in Chengdu, China. She was 94.
Ms. Xia’s death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter Jung Chang.
Ms. Chang’s memoir, which was banned in China, was a groundbreaking, intimate account of the country’s turbulent 20th century and the iron grip of Mao’s Communist Party, told through the lives of three generations of women: herself, her mother and her grandmother. An epic of imprisonment, suffering and family loyalty, it sold over 15 million copies in 40 languages.
The story of Ms. Chang’s stoic mother holding the family together while battling on behalf of her husband, a functionary who was tortured and imprisoned during Mao’s regime, was the focus of “Wild Swans,” which emerged out of hours of recordings that Ms. Chang made when Ms. Xia visited her in London in 1988.
Ms. Xia was inspired as a teenager to become an ardent Communist revolutionary because of the mistreatment of women in the Republic of China, as well as the corruption of the Kuomintang nationalists in power. (Her own mother had been forced into concubinage at 15 by a powerful warlord.)
In 1947, in Ms. Xia’s home city of Jinzhou, the Communists were waging guerrilla war against the government. She joined the struggle by distributing pamphlets for Mao, rolling them up inside green peppers after they had been smuggled into the city in bundles of sorghum stalks.
Captured by the Kuomintang, she was forced to listen to “the screams of people being tortured in the rooms nearby,” her daughter later wrote. But that only stiffened her resolve.
She married Chang Shou-yu, an up-and-coming Communist civil servant and acolyte of Mao, in 1949.
It was then that disillusionment began to set in, according to her daughter. The newlyweds were ordered to travel a thousand miles to Sichuan, her husband’s home province. Because of Mr. Chang’s rank, he was allowed to ride in a jeep, but she had to walk, even though she was pregnant, and suffered a miscarriage as a result.
“She was vomiting all the time,” her daughter wrote. “Could he not let her travel in his jeep occasionally? He said he could not, because it would be taken as favoritism since my mother was not entitled to the car.”
That was the first of many times that her husband would insist she bow to the rigid dictates of the party, despite the immense suffering it caused.
When she was a party official in the mid-1950s, Ms. Xia was investigated for her “bourgeois” background and imprisoned for months. She received little support from Mr. Chang.
“As my mother was leaving for detention,” Ms. Chang wrote, “my father advised her: ‘Be completely honest with the party, and have complete trust in it. It will give you the right verdict.’ A wave of aversion swept over her.”
Upon her release in 1957, she told her husband, “You are a good Communist, but a rotten husband.” Mr. Chang could only nod in agreement.
He became one of the top officials in Sichuan, entitled to a life of privilege. But by the late 1960s, he had become outraged by the injustices of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s blood-soaked purge, and was determined to register a formal complaint.
Ms. Xia was in despair; she knew what became of families who spoke out. “Why do you want to be a moth that throws itself into the fire?” she asked.
Mr. Chang’s career was over, and both he and his wife were subjected to physical abuse and imprisoned. Ms. Xia’s position was lower profile; she was in charge of resolving personal problems, such as housing, transfers and pensions, for people in her district. But that did not save her from brutal treatment.
Ms. Xia was made to kneel on broken glass; paraded through the streets of Chengdu wearing a dunce’s cap and a heavy placard with her name crossed out; and forced to bow to jeering crowds.
Still, she resisted pressure from the party to denounce her husband. And unlike many other women in her position, she refused to divorce him.
Twice she journeyed to Beijing to seek his release, the second time securing a meeting with the prime minister, Zhou Enlai, who was considered a moderate. Ms. Xia was “one of the very few spouses of victims who had the courage to go and appeal in Peking,” her daughter wrote in “Wild Swans.”
But Ms. Xia and her husband never criticized the Cultural Revolution in front of their children, checked by the party’s absolute power and the fear it inspired.
“My parents never said anything to me or my siblings,” Ms. Chang wrote. “The restraints which had kept them silent about politics before still prevented them from opening their minds to us.”
She was held at Xichiang prison camp from 1969 to 1971 as a “class enemy,” made to do heavy labor and endure denunciation meetings.
The camp, though less harsh than her husband’s, was a bitter experience. “She reflected with remorse on the pointlessness of her devotion,” her daughter wrote. “She found she missed her children with a pain which was almost unbearable.”
Xia De-hong was born on May 4, 1931, in Yixian, the daughter of Yang Yu-fang and Gen. Xue Zhi-heng, the inspector general of the metropolitan police in the nationalist government.
When she was an infant, her mother fled the house of the general, who was dying, and returned to her parents, eventually marrying a rich Manchurian doctor, Xia Rui-tang.
Ms. Xia grew up in Jinzhou, Manchuria, where she attended school before joining the Communist underground.
In the 1950s, when she began to have doubts about the Communist Party, she considered abandoning it and pursuing her dream of studying medicine, her daughter said. But the idea terrified her husband, Ms. Chang said in an interview, because it would have meant disavowing the Communists.
By the late 1950s, during the Mao-induced Great Famine that killed tens of millions, both of her parents had become “totally disillusioned,” Ms. Chang said, and “could no longer find excuses to forgive their party.”
Mr. Chang died in 1975, broken by years of imprisonment and ill treatment. Ms. Xia retired from her government service, as deputy head of the People’s Congress of the Eastern District of Chengdu, in 1983.
Besides Ms. Chang, Ms. Xia is survived by another daughter, Xiao-hong Chang; three sons, Jin-ming, Xiao-hei and Xiao-fang; and two grandchildren.
Jung Chang saw her mother for the last time in 2018. Ms. Chang’s criticism of the regime, in her memoir and a subsequent biography, made returning to China unthinkable. She told the BBC in a recent interview that she never knew whether her mother had read “Wild Swans.”
But the advice her mother gave her and her brother Xiao-hei, a journalist who also lives in London, was firm: “She only wanted us to write truthfully, and accurately.”
In prehistoric northern Europe, peatlands — areas of waterlogged soil rich with decaying plant matter — were considered spiritual sites. Since then, swords, jewelry and even human bodies have been found fossilized in their sludgy depths. More recently, however, many of these bogs have been depleted by overharvesting, neglect and development. But as awareness of their important role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere grows, more wetlands are being restored, while also serving as unlikely creative inspiration. Here’s how bogs are showing up in the culture.
Fashion
At fall 2026 Paris Fashion Week, several houses — including Louis Vuitton (above left) and Hermès — staged shows amid mossy sets featuring spongy green structures and mounds of vegetation. And the Danish fashion brand Solitude Studios is distressing its eerie, grungy looks (above right) by submerging them in a local peat bog.
Contemporary Art
For her exhibition at California’s San José Museum of Art, on view through October, the Chalon Nation artist Christine Howard Sandoval is presenting sculptures, drawings and plant-dyed works (above) exploring how the state’s wetlands were once sites of Indigenous resistance and community. This month, at Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley, the conceptual artist Anicka Yi will unveil an outdoor installation featuring six-foot-tall transparent columns holding algae-rich ecosystems cultivated from nearby pond water and soil.
Architecture and Design
The Bog Bothy (above), a mobile design project by the Dublin-based architecture practice 12th Field in collaboration with the Irish Architecture Foundation, was inspired by the makeshift huts once used by peat cutters who harvested the material for fuel. After debuting in the Irish Midlands last year, it’ll tour the region again this summer. In Edinburgh, the designer Oisín Gallagher is making doorstops from subfossilized bog-oak scraps carbon-dated to 3300 B.C.
Fine Dining
At La Grenouillère on France’s north coast, the chef Alexandre Gauthier reflects the restaurant’s reedy, frog-filled river valley landscape with dishes like a “marsh bubble” of herbs encased in hardened sugar. This spring, Aponiente — the chef Ángel León’s restaurant inside a 19th-century tidal mill on Spain’s Bay of Cádiz — added an outdoor dining area on a pier above the neighboring marshland, serving local sea grasses and salt marsh flowers alongside seafood (above) from the estuary.
Literature
The Irish British writer Maggie O’Farrell’s forthcoming novel, “Land,” about an Irish cartographer and his son surveying the island in 1865 after the Great Famine, depicts haunting encounters with the verdant landscape, including its plentiful oozing bogs.
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