FRISCO, Texas (AP) — Mikko Rantanen sustained a torn MCL in his knee during the Olympics, an injury that Dallas Stars general manager Jim Nill says kept their standout forward from being himself the rest of the season.
Rantanen missed 15 games for the Stars after getting hurt while playing for bronze medal-winning Finland in February. He returned for the final 10 games of the regular season, with one goal and four assists in that span. He then had one goal and six assists when they lost their first-round playoff series to Minnesota in six games.
“Major injury. Came back, he's very competitive,” Nill said Thursday during his season-ending availability. “Did he come back too soon? Not too soon, but would have been nice to have one or two more weeks to really settle in. He never really got going again.”
In 54 games before the Olympics, Rantanen had 21 goals and 51 assists. The Stars got him in a deadline deal last season, signed him to a $96 million, eight-year extension, and he then an remarkable postseason with nine goals and 13 assists in 18 games when they made the Western Conference final for the third year in a row.
Dallas was done after one round this year, and Rantanen wasn't the only player dealing with a significant injury.
Nill said Rantanen didn’t have and won’t require any surgery, and will benefit from having some extended time off along with so many of their other players.
“We never had one game where we had a full lineup this whole season and the playoffs,” Nill said “I’ve never seen that before.”
The Stars also go into an offseason when 45-goal scorer Jason Robertson can become a restricted free agent and with longtime captain Jamie Benn pondering a decision on whether to return for an 18th NHL season, all in Dallas.
Top-line center Roope Hintz missed four games after the Olympics because of illness, then tore his left hamstring in two places on March 6 in his only game since. That was after the Stars in December lost Tyler Seguin to an ACL injury.
Miro Heiskanen, their top defenseman, missed the final three games of the regular season after an oblique tear and then sprained an ankle during the playoffs.
Radek Faksa was close to returning from a concussion in the Olympics when his foot got sliced by a skate. He got back for the last two regular-season games and the playoffs, but Nill said the significant laceration may require further surgery.
Nill said defenseman Nils Lundkvist, who took a skate to his face in Game 4 against the Wild, could have possibly returned had that series gotten to a Game 7.
“A very lucky man. The skate ended up hitting him, really hit into him more than anything,” Nill said. “He had stitches inside and outside, but he also had a concussion.”
Nill plans to reach out soon to Robertson’s agent with the focus of getting the point-a-game forward signed to a new deal.
While there were some talks last summer, and some progress was made, both sides then agreed to put those on hold until after this season.
“He’s a big part of our team. We drafted and developed him, and we want him to be a Dallas Star for the rest of his career,” Nill said.
A second-round pick by the Stars in 2017, Robertson has 490 points (213 goals and 277 assists) in 456 regular-season games. That includes three 40-goal seasons before his 27th birthday this summer, a year before he could become an unrestricted free agent.
Robertson just completed the final season of a $31 million, four-year contract he got after a training camp holdout in 2022. He played all 328 regular-season games in that stretch.
Benn has been the Stars captain since 2013-14, and like last offseason has a decision to make about whether he wants to play another season.
“We’re going to give him a couple of weeks, but I want him back. I think he wants to come back,” Nill said. “But I’m going to give him that time.”
Benn, who turns 37 in July, missed the first 19 games because of a punctured lung and his 60 games played were his fewest in a full 82-game regular season. He had 15 goals and 21 assists while playing on a one-year deal after the end of a $76 million, eight-year deal.
Hall of Fame center Mike Modano is the only player in franchise history with more than Benn’s 1,252 regular-season games, 414 goals and 992 points.
AP NHL playoffs: https://apnews.com/hub/stanley-cup and https://apnews.com/hub/nhl
Dallas Stars left wing Jamie Benn (14) looks on after losing Game 6 in the first round of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup playoff series against the Minnesota Wild, Thursday, April 30, 2026, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Bailey Hillesheim)
Dallas Stars right wing Mikko Rantanen (96) looks on after Minnesota Wild left wing Matt Boldy scored during the third period of Game 6 in the first round of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup playoff series Thursday, April 30, 2026, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Bailey Hillesheim)
MADRID (AP) — Health authorities across four continents Thursday were tracking down and monitoring passengers who disembarked a hantavirus-stricken cruise ship before its deadly outbreak was detected, and trying to trace others who may have come into contact with them since then.
In Argentina, a team of investigators has yet to leave for the southern town they suspect the outbreak originated when a Dutch couple may have contracted the virus while on a bird-watching trip before they boarded the cruise ship, officials from the country's Health Ministry told The Associated Press on Thursday.
On April 24, nearly two weeks after the first passenger had died on board, more than two dozen people from at least 12 different countries left the ship without contact tracing, the ship’s operator and Dutch officials said Thursday.
Three passengers have died in the outbreak — a Dutch couple and a German national — and several others are sick. Symptoms usually show between one and eight weeks after exposure.
None of the remaining passengers or crew on the ship are currently symptomatic, the Netherlands-based Oceanwide Expeditions cruise ship company said Thursday.
The World Health Organization says the risk to the wider public is low. Hantavirus is usually spread by the inhalation of contaminated rodent droppings and isn't easily transmitted between people.
“We believe this will be a limited outbreak if the public health measures are implemented and solidarity is shown across all countries,” said Dr. Abdirahman Mahamud, the WHO's alert and response director on Thursday.
Three people, including the ship’s doctor, were evacuated Wednesday while the ship was near the West African island country of Cape Verde and taken to specialized hospitals in Europe for treatment.
The body of the Dutch man who was the first to die on board on April 11 was taken off the ship on the remote South Atlantic island of St. Helena on April 24, when his wife also disembarked. She then flew to South Africa a day later and died there.
The ship's operator said Thursday that a total of 30 passengers — including the deceased Dutch man and his wife — left the vessel at St. Helena. The Dutch Foreign Ministry has put the figure at about 40. The company had not previously said publicly that dozens more people left the ship on April 24.
It wasn't until May 2 that health authorities first confirmed hantavirus in a passenger on the ship, the WHO says. That was in a British man evacuated from the ship to South Africa three days after the St. Helena stop. He was tested in South Africa and is in intensive care there.
It emerged Wednesday that a man tested positive for hantavirus in Switzerland after he disembarked at St. Helena, though his precise movements in between aren’t clear.
On Thursday, Singaporean health authorities said they were monitoring two men who got off the ship at St. Helena, flew to South Africa and then home. The two men, who arrived in Singapore at different times, were being isolated and tested, officials said.
Authorities in St. Helena, the volcanic British territory in the South Atlantic where passengers disembarked, said they were monitoring a small number of people who were considered “higher risk contacts.” Those higher risk contacts were being told to isolate for 45 days, the St. Helena government said.
The Dutch health ministry said Thursday that a flight attendant on a plane briefly boarded by an infected cruise passenger in South Africa was showing symptoms of hantavirus and would be tested in an isolation ward at a hospital in Amsterdam. The cruise passenger, the Dutch woman whose husband died on the ship, was too ill to take the international flight to Europe and was taken off the plane in Johannesburg, where she died.
If the Dutch flight attendant tests positive, she could be the first known person not on the MV Hondius to become infected in the outbreak.
The vessel is now sailing to Spain’s Canary Islands, where it is expected to arrive on Saturday or Sunday, with more than 140 passengers and crew members still on board.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Thursday that he had been in regular touch with the ship's captain, and that morale improved once it began moving again.
Authorities in South Africa are also trying to trace contacts of any passengers who previously got off the ship. They have focused mainly on an April 25 flight from St. Helena to Johannesburg, the day after passengers disembarked there.
A French citizen with “benign symptoms” is in isolation and undergoing medical tests, after being identified as a contact case linked to the ship passenger who flew April 25 from St. Helena to Johannesburg and was confirmed to have hantavirus, the French Health Ministry said in a statement Thursday.
The Dutch woman from the cruise ship who later died in South Africa was on that St. Helena-Johannesburg flight, officials have said. It's not known how many other cruise passengers also were among the 88 people on it, but flights from St. Helena go to South Africa and are rare, normally once a week.
The body of the third fatality, a German woman, is also still on board the ship after she died on May 2.
Tests have confirmed that at least five people who were on the ship were infected with a hantavirus found in South America, called the Andes virus. The only hantavirus thought to spread human-to-human, it can cause a severe and often fatal lung disease called hantavirus pulmonary syndrome.
The ship departed from Argentina and investigations into the outbreak’s source are focusing there.
The Dutch couple that presented the first two cases had traveled through Argentina, Chile and Uruguay on a bird-watching trip before boarding the ship, the WHO said. They visited sites where the species of rat known to carry Andes virus was present.
Argentina’s Health Ministry has zeroed in on the town of Ushuaia in their investigation, but they’ve yet to dispatch the team, according to a written statement given to AP. Scientists from the state-funded Malbrán Institute planned to travel to Ushuaia “in the coming days,” the statement said.
Once in Ushuaia, a 3.5-hour flight from Argentina’s capital, Buenos Aires, the experts will analyze rodents at the trash heap there to see if they carry the Andes virus, officials said.
The WHO is working with health authorities in Argentina to understand the couple's movements and has arranged to ship 2,500 diagnostic kits from Argentina to laboratories in five countries.
Argentina’s health ministry said there were 28 deaths from hantavirus last year, up from an average mortality rate of 15 in the five years before that. Nearly a third of cases last year were fatal, it said.
Quell reported from The Hague, Netherlands, Imray from Cape Town, South Africa, and DeBre from Buenos Aires, Argentina. AP writers Jill Lawless in London and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed.
A view of the m/v Hondius Cruise ship anchored at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Monday, May 4, 2026. (AP Photo/Arilson Almeida)
Health workers get off the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius, a cruise ship carrying nearly 150 people as it remains off Cape Verde on Monday, May 4, 2026 after three passengers died and several others fell seriously ill in a suspected hantavirus outbreak. (Qasem Elhato via AP)
Medical personnel in hazmat suits wait for patients, evacuated from the MV Hondius cruise ship with suspected hantavirus infection, at Schiphol airport, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)
Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship into an ambulance at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
The MV Hondius cruise ship departs the port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
