BOSTON — Watching one of your kids grow up and leave the house is difficult. Watching one grow up then kicking them out is even harder.

Chris MacFarland did the latter Friday night.

The Avalanche did not want to trade Mikko Rantanen. No one ever wants to trade a 50-goal scorer. That’s why trades of this magnitude rarely occur. But when your hand is forced, you have to do what you have to do.

In talking to people around the game in the 24 after the Avs shipped Rantanen to the Carolina Hurricanes, MacFarland’s hand was definitely forced. You could tell it from his tone and demeanor when he said Saturday trading the star forward wasn’t something he wanted to do.

The Rantanen camp wouldn’t budge on a salary the Avalanche refused to match.

“It’s a bittersweet day for us,’ MacFarland said. “(Rantanen) is a decorated player for us. He’s an elite winger in this league, so it was a tough few days. We just felt the timing was right and the last few days it kind of came together, but it wasn’t without a lot of serious thought, I can tell you that.”

The $14 million-per-year number that’s been thrown around is a real thing. Rantanen is an elite player who makes scoring goals look incredibly easy. There are very few players who are capable of doing that.

But paying him more than Nathan MacKinnon?

That wasn’t going to happen.

“The cap is going to go up, but you’ve still got to do you internal outlooks for next year,” MacFarland said. “It’s clear we’re not deep enough. And I think that you’ve got to be deep to go four rounds, and hopefully this is going to help that.”

The internal outlook around the Avalanche is mostly based around three things: MacKinnon’s current cap hit, Cale Makar’s future cap hit and the continued uncertainty around their captain, Gabriel Landeskog.

MacKinnon’s number is set, but until Makar signs his new deal, that’s the limit. Makar still has three seasons left on the contract he signed in 2021. He’s eligible to sign a new contract July 1, 2026, and you can bet the Avalanche had planned that Makar (and not Mikko Rantanen) was going to be the one to break the MacKinnon cap.

As for Landeskog? Well, that situation is still clear as mud. When I asked MacFarland Saturday if the captain’s status had changed, the answer was a firm no. Landeskog is on this east-coast trip with the team, but he does that from time to time.

The uncertainty around the captain is still playing a role in their cap decisions, and that can’t continue much longer.

“The player you just mentioned (Landeskog), we still have a serious unknown on that,” MacFarland said. “We don’t have that information today. We have to operate in many different lenses and look at it from many different perspectives.”

With all those situations taken into consideration, the Avalanche made the choice they didn’t want to make in trading Rantanen — a player the Avalanche drafted at the age of 18 and watched develop into not only a star, but a Stanley Cup champion.

Are they a better team today than they two days ago? No. Any team that gives up the best player in the deal rarely comes out on top. When MacFarland made the decision to trade Rantanen, he had to have known he wasn’t winning the deal.

All things considered, MacFarland didn’t do too bad. Martin Necas sits 12th in the NHL in points and fits how the Avalanche like to play, while Jack Drury will help push some of the AHL players out of the lineup. 

But neither of them is the caliber of Rantanen and that will sting. And it stung MacFarland.

The Avalanche didn’t want their guy to leave the nest. But when he’s acting up, sometimes you must make the decision you never wanted to make.