Trading Moose is fan abuse. Surely, they’re not done. Right? Shipping out Mikko Rantanen has to be the beginning of a mid-season makeover — not the Finn-ishing piece. Surely, somebody’s coming. Somebody big. Sidney Crosby, finally playing with his good pal Nathan MacKinnon at age 37. Gabe Landeskog, for one last ride on two good knees. Somebody. Anybody. Swapping a 100-point scorer and a pivotal piece of a Stanley Cup champ (Rantanen) for a 65-point speedster (Martin Necas), a middle-6 forward (Jack Drury) and two draft picks is interesting. As a preamble. In isolation? It’s a salary dump. It’s waving a white flag when you should be raising more banners. RELATED: The 10 biggest trades in Colorado sports history after Avs trade Mikko Rantanen to Carolina MacKinnon turns 30 in September. The Avs ought to be in the business of snapping up more Mikkos for Nate and Cale Makar, not gifting them to Raleigh. The future? To heck with the future. Your future is now. And your front office wouldn’t pay $14 million to a forward who averages 1.1 points per game while it’s giving Landy $7 million to rehab and Val Nichushkin $6.1 million with fingers crossed. Surely, there’s more. Gotta be. Given Rantanen’s reported contract demands, it’s better to land something now than nothing later. Get that. Yes, Makar’s about to get a big-money extension. Get that, too. Yes, you don’t want to be Toronto, which has almost $47 million in salary right now eaten up by four forwards. Totally get that. But there’s one thing I still can’t shake, even after sleeping on it. See, NHL franchises in recent years that shipped out big-money guys — even if it “had to be done,” the way Xwitter kept telling me Friday — for depth and salary relief have one thing in common. The teams trading the stars usually wind up taking it in the shorts. Before there was Rantanen, there was Jack Eichel. Remember Jack? Things got ugly in Buffalo. So in November 2021, the Sabres swapped him to Vegas along with a third-round pick for two players (Alex Tuch, Peyton Krebs) and two draft picks. What happened? Eichel got healthy in the desert, averaged 67 points in ’22-23 and ’23-24, and led the Golden Knights to a 2023 Cup victory, racking up 26 points over 22 postseason games two springs ago. The Sabres? Tuch averaged less than a point per game in upstate New York, Buffalo hasn’t finished higher than fifth in its division since the trade, and it’s currently last in the Atlantic division. Before there was Rantanen, there was Matthew Tkachuk.  Remember Matt? Just like Mikko and the Avs, extension talks between Tkachuk and Calgary in the summer of 2022 were going nowhere. So in late July, the Flames traded him, along with a conditional fourth-round pick, to Florida for Jonathan Huberdeau, MacKenzie Weegar, Cole Schwindt and a first-round pick. You know the rest of the story, and it ain’t pretty. Tkachuk, The Rat King, helped transform the Panthers into the Bad Boys of the NHL. He produced 123 points over his first season in South Florida. In Year 2, he steered the Panthers to a Cup Final, eventually losing out to Eichel and his Knights. In Year 3, this past spring, he lifted the Cup. The Flames? Oy vey. Huberdeau went from a 115-point scorer in Florida to averaging just 0.69 points per tilt for Calgary, which, no shock, hasn’t made the playoffs since sending Tkachuk south. It’s not a perfect parallel, granted. The Sabres and Flames didn’t have anybody on their respective rosters as good as MacKinnon or Makar, let alone both of them at the same time. 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Title windows, no matter how sure the glass, don’t stay open forever. “In dealing with this we tried to find a way that we could get the greatest return possible. … There were many teams that we talked to, and there were many deals that made no sense. And to be quite honest, there were 10 times over the last two weeks where I didn’t think (this) deal made any sense.” That was Rockies owner Dick Monfort, back in February 2021, trying to explain a deal he made anyway. It’s been four years since the Rockies traded away a franchise icon (third baseman Nolan Arenado) to St. Louis, with cash, for a pitcher (Austin Gomber) and four prospects who never panned out. Mikko isn’t Nolan. The hurt’s the same. Saturday was a Drury morning along the Front Range. The Avs may be on the right side of the cap again. But they’ve got a heck of a lot of work to do to make sure they don’t land on the wrong side of history. Want more Avalanche news? 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