Ranking Mikko Rantanen and the 10 Best NHL Revenge Performances
Revenge can take many forms, especially in sports, and most definitely in hockey. Whether a team or player gets payback on the scoreboard or with their fists or both only helps amp up how much attention is paid, but those who give back what they once got can become legends by doing so.
In the first round of the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs, we saw Mikko Rantanen of the Dallas Stars net a hat trick in Game 7 against his old team the Colorado Avalanche. The player and team didn't exactly have an acrimonious split, but when the Avs traded him to Carolina, we're pretty sure they weren't banking on facing him so early in the postseason.
Seeing Rantanen go off against his old team got us thinking back to other moments in NHL history where revenge wasn't just a dish best served cold -- it was ice cold. We're going to rank out these payback moments and we've no doubt lost track of some over time and we're all ears (eyes?) to hearing from you about them.
10. Michael Ryder haunts Canadiens with Bruins
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We're sure there a lot of "what if" moments throughout the history of the Montréal Canadiens and where not re-signing forward Michael Ryder slots in probably wouldn't immediately come to mind. When Ryder left the Canadiens in free agency in 2008, he latched on with the rival Boston Bruins.
Ryder's time with the Habs showed he was a dynamite goal scorer. In his first four seasons there, he put up 99 goals and scored 30 in a season in back-to-back years. But in his fourth season, he netted just 14 goals, his ice time dropped, and his role was minimized while a group of younger players like Sergei and Andrei Kostitsyn, Chris Higgins, and Guillaume Latendresse seized their moments and pushed him down.
Ryder made it immediately painful for the Canadiens while with the Bruins. The teams met in the playoffs in 2009, and the Bruins handled the Canadiens with ease in a four-game sweep. Ryder was Boston's leading scorer with four goals and three assists and had the go-ahead goal in Game 3's 4-2 win.
In 2011, the Habs and Bruins again met in the first round, only this time the series went seven games. Ryder wasn't as omnipresent as he was in the 2009 matchup, but in Game 4, he was a monster with two goals and an assist and had the overtime game-winner at Bell Centre. Boston went on to win their first Stanley Cup since 1972 that season.
9. Joé Juneau's revenge against Bruins took four years to happen
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When Joé Juneau arrived in the NHL with the Boston Bruins in 1992, he was a sensation.
Juneau had 32 goals and 102 points and finished second in Calder Trophy voting to Teemu Selanne who just happened to set the rookie goal scoring record that season with 76 and had 132 points with the Winnipeg Jets. Juneau teamed up with Adam Oates, Ray Bourque and Dmitri Kvartalnov to lead the Bruins to the second-best record in the league. The following season he was traded to the Washington Capitals for thunderous shooting defenseman Al Iafrate.
At the time, the trade made sense in a way because the Bruins got Cam Neely back from a brutal knee injury and they needed blue line help. Sacrificing Juneau to make it happen, however, was seen as a head-scratcher because he just had a 100-point season.
Fast forward to 1998 and the Bruins and Capitals squared off in the first-round of the playoffs. Juneau wasn't the big-time scorer he was that first season, but he again was teamed up with Oates in D.C. and with the series knotted at 1-1 and headed to Boston, Juneau stuck a dagger in the Bruins with the overtime winner in Game 3.
Iafrate was long gone and would retire after the 1998 season with the San Jose Sharks. Juneau, meanwhile, was a huge playoff performer that season as he helped the Capitals reach the franchise's first ever Stanley Cup Final. Juneau and Oates led the Caps in playoff scoring that season, but it wasn't enough to take out the Red Wings. It was, however, more than enough to remind the Bruins that they'd made some glaring long-term mistakes.
8. The Sabres' Curse of Daniel Brière
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When we last saw the Buffalo Sabres in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, it was 2011 and the Ryan Miller-led team lost a hard-fought seven-game series against the Philadelphia Flyers. What made that loss hard to stomach at the time was who was most responsible for knocking out the Sabres -- former Sabres star Daniel Brière.
Brière was a monster in that series scoring six goals to lead the Flyers. The Sabres had a 3-2 series lead headed into Game 6 at home, but Brière scored twice in Game 6 as Philadelphia won 5-4 in overtime, on a goal by soon-to-be-Sabre Ville Leino. Brière also scored in Game 7 that gave the Flyers a 2-0 lead in a game they went on to win 5-2.
Infamously, Brière left the Sabres for the Flyers in free agency in 2007 when then Sabres GM Darcy Regier focused more on trying to re-sign Chris Drury and wound up signing neither of them. That the team he left Buffalo for wound up being the one that sent the franchise into a playoffs-free spiral for the past 14 years makes it all the more difficult to stomach for Sabres fans.
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7. Jaromír Jágr teases Penguins, beats them with Flyers
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We're turning back the clock to the summer of 2011. Jaromír Jágr just completed his last season with Avangard Omsk in the KHL and was ready to return to the NHL after playing in Russia for the past three seasons. At age 39, Jágr played well enough in Russia that he was able to earn a lot of interest from teams again including his first team, the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Jágr's parting years ago from the Pens did not go well and fans were sore seeing him play for hated rivals in Washington and New York, including an MVP-caliber season in 2005-06 with the Rangers. Twitter ran wild with speculation about Jágr returning to Pittsburgh, but he would wind up signing with yet another bitter rival, the Philadelphia Flyers.
In Jágr's first game back in Pittsburgh, he was booed lustily for teasing the idea of returning to the Penguins only to wind up on the other side of Pennsylvania instead. Jágr scored that night and broke out his iconic salute celly and led the Flyers to a 4-2 win.
Fast forward a few months and the teams met in the first round of the playoffs. Jágr had a goal and six assists as the Flyers knocked out the Penguins in a wild six-game series.
6. Wayne Gretzky reminded the Oilers exactly who they traded away
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The most shocking trade in professional sports history happened in the summer of 1988. The Edmonton Oilers traded Wayne Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings. There were a lot of reasons why the trade happened and for as much logic was involved in those reasons, Gretzky was still the best and most recognizable player in the NHL by leaps and bounds and the Oilers traded him after he helped the franchise win their fourth Stanley Cup of the 80s.
It was only fitting that his first season with the Kings saw them reach the playoffs and, lo and behold, there were the Oilers waiting for them in the first round. Instead of playing with Mark Messier and Jari Kurri, he was facing off against them with new teammates Bernie Nicholls, Luc Robitaille and Chris Kontos.
Gretzky put up 13 points (four goals, nine assists) in the series as the Kings came back from being down 3-1 in the series to win it in seven. He had two goals and an assist in their 6-3 Game 7 victory to complete the comeback.
There's no doubt that loss of Gretzky and the series was a monstrous gut-punch to the Oilers and their fans, but Edmonton got their own revenge the following year when they swept the Kings in the Smythe Division Final en route to winning their fifth Cup, this time without Gretzky.
5. Nazem Kadri silences the hate in St. Louis
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The Colorado Avalanche's run to the Stanley Cup in 2022 was loaded with storylines, some that lasted well beyond thanks to Gabriel Landeskog's miraculous return to action in this year's playoffs after he was injured during their run to that title. But one of the most heated stories of those playoffs centered around Nazem Kadri and Blues goalie Jordan Binnington.
Kadri collided with Binnington in Game 3 of the series, a play that led to Binnington throwing a water bottle at Kadri after the game while Kadri was being interviewed on TV and ultimately forced Binnington out for the rest of the series with an injury. The play also unleashed a torrent of threats and hate from Blues fans directed at Kadri online which made an already ugly situation much, much worse.
Kadri responded to all of that by scoring a hat trick in Game 4 and led the Avalanche to a six-game series victory. He tied with Nathan MacKinnon with seven points in the series as the Avs advanced to the Western Conference Final and ultimately won the Cup.
4. Mikko Rantanen eliminates Avalanche friends with Stars
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Any time a team trades away a superstar player, when they meet again it will be a big story. But Mikko Rantanen's tour around the NHL this season wasn't initially meant to pit him against his former teammates in Colorado so soon.
When Rantanen and the Avalanche weren't able to get a contract extension worked out, the Avs made the choice to trade the star winger away to Carolina and out of the Western Conference. It was a great idea to do that because why send him somewhere else in the West and have to maybe deal with him in the playoffs?
Funny thing that. Rantanen and Carolina did not hit it off. At all. Hurricanes GM Eric Tulsky was left with no choice but to trade Rantanen again after he had six points in 13 games and made it clear he would not sign in Carolina. Fittingly, the 'Canes didn't want to see him in the playoffs themselves and instead of sending him to Toronto, they packaged him up to Dallas. So, when the playoff field was settled it only made sense that Dallas and Colorado would square off.
What we were treated to was something that surely irks a lot of Avalanche fans. Rantanen had five goals and seven assists in the Stars seven-game series victory including scoring a hat trick in the third period of Game 7's 4-2 win in which Dallas came back from being down 2-0 in the final 19:29 of the third.
It's a remarkable performance on Rantanen's part and one that was able to silence anyone that ever erroneously felt he was only able to pile up points by playing next to Nathan MacKinnon.
3. Canada one-ups the United States again for Four Nations Face-Off title
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The Four Nations Face-Off might be the kind of tournament we'll never see again and if that's the case, it's something the guys who played for the United States will have eat at them for a long time because of the way Canada was able to take them out in overtime in the championship game.
The United States was able to beat Canada 3-1 in the round robin portion of the tournament which helped earn them an automatic spot in the final while Canada needed to beat Finland to get there. Canada had to sweat things out in a 5-3 win over the Finns to set up a date in the final against the U.S.
Both matchups were evenly played and that the U.S. won an emotional game in Montréal in which the fans booed them with ferocity seemed to play into their hands getting the final game on home ice in Boston. Instead, Canada was able to come back from a 2-1 deficit in the title game thanks to a Sam Bennett goal to force overtime.
In OT, who else but Connor McDavid was able to get free in the slot to snap a shot past Connor Hellebuyck for the victory. It was yet another hard loss for the U.S. against Canada and one that was reminiscent of their loss in the 2010 Olympics in which Sidney Crosby scored the "Golden Goal" against Ryan Miller in overtime.
2. Cam Neely gets retribution against Ulf Samuelsson
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In the late-80s and early-90s, there were tough guys, there were enforcers and then there were guys that would hurt you. Defenseman Ulf Samuelsson was a guy who fit the latter category and Bruins winger Cam Neely nearly had his career ended by Samuelsson in 1991.
The Bruins and Penguins met in the Wales Conference Finals that year and in Game 3, Samuelsson delivered a knee-on-knee hit against Neely, a fearsome power forward, and left him addled for the remainder of the series. After Pittsburgh finished off Boston in six games, Neely's career changed drastically.
For two years, Neely had surgery and rehabilitated the injury to his knee. He was held to just nine games the following season and 13 the year after that. But one of those 13 games in the 1992-1993 season came against Samuelsson and the Penguins and Neely made sure to get his pound of flesh.
Neely wasted no time going after Samuelsson and earned an instigator, fighting major and a game misconduct for pummeling the Penguins defenseman who had no desire whatsoever to fight.
While Neely was not able to again play a full season after the injury, in 1993-1994 while playing in only 49 games as he rested many nights because of his knee, he scored 50 goals in one of the most impressive and hard-fought seasons by a player in history. Neely retired following the 1995-1996 season while Samuelsson played until 2000 and amassed 2,453 penalty minutes in 1,080 career games.
1. Detroit Red Wings get revenge on Claude Lemieux and Colorado Avalanche
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The mid-to-late 1990s in the NHL featured the kind of rivalry that all other rivalries wish they could be, just maybe without all the reckless violence. The battles between the Colorado Avalanche and Detroit Red Wings weren't just between arguably the two most talented teams in the league but featured two teams that hated each other with the fire of a thousand suns.
How the blood in this blood rivalry was first struck depends on the color of the lenses you're looking through. Avalanche players and fans swear it all started with a Slava Kozlov hit on Adam Foote in Game 3 of their Western Conference Final matchup that required Foote to get 20 stitches. Red Wings players, fans (and most everyone else) will point to Claude Lemieux's brutal hit on Kris Draper into the boards in Game 6.
Draper had to go to the hospital following the hit. He had a broken jaw and his orbital and cheekbone were shattered and required reconstructive surgery. He needed to have his jaw wired shut as well. The Avalanche eliminated the Red Wings in Game 6 and went on to win the Stanley Cup while the Wings, who had been league favorites to win for the past few seasons and lost to Lemieux's New Jersey Devils in the 1995 Cup Final seethed through the offseason.
The NHL was well aware of the Red Wings' desire to seek retribution on Lemieux into the next season, and it wasn't until their final regular season meeting on March 26, 1997 that things exploded in one of the most surreal instances of unabashed on-ice violence to be witnessed in decades.
What started with a wrestling match between Peter Forsberg and Igor Larionov erupted into a full-ice line brawl. Darren McCarty jumped Lemieux and pounded on him. Patrick Roy raced out to try and help his teammate only to be intercepted in mid-air by Brendan Shanahan. Roy and Wings goalie Mike Vernon brawled at center ice while Shanahan and Foote tussled.
Somehow, no one was kicked out of the game and when it was all said and done, the Red Wings won the game 6-5 when McCarty scored in overtime. The win lit the fire for Detroit heading into the playoffs and they met the Avs again in the West Final, only this time they won it in six games and won the Stanley Cup for the first time since 1955.
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