It has been a fairly busy summer for the Rangers who have shaken things up in their forward group, their back end, and even between the pipes.\u00a0 The end result has been six newcomers joining the team.<\/p>\n
It appears that GM Chris Drury would like to add to that number.\u00a0 Vincent Z. Mercogliano of The Athletic reports<\/a> that the Rangers are still hoping to add another forward to their group before training camp gets underway in September.<\/p>\n In terms of newcomers up front, their biggest splash was the acquisition of Pavel Dorofeyev<\/a> from Vegas along with the subsequent seven-year, $77MM contract.\u00a0 They also added winger Oliver Bjorkstrand<\/a> and center Joe Veleno<\/a> in free agency.\u00a0 Vincent Trocheck<\/a> was traded to Utah (with promising center prospect Cole Beaudoin<\/a> part of the return, though likely ticketed to start at AHL Hartford) while Adam Edstrom<\/a> was traded to Nashville and Conor Sheary<\/a> (Buffalo) and Jonny Brodzinski<\/a> (Washington) moved on as free agents.<\/p>\n While there is certainly a spot to be upgraded in their current forward group, the challenge here for Drury will be affording that upgrade.\u00a0 Per PuckPedia<\/a>, the Rangers only have $2.4MM in cap space, an amount that isn\u2019t likely to land someone of much consequence.\u00a0 Additionally, they still have to re-sign defenseman Vincent Iorio<\/a> with his salary cutting into their spending space if they intend to carry him on the NHL roster next season.\u00a0 By the time the team leaves itself a bit of a wiggle room for early-season injuries and recalls, there isn\u2019t much to go around.<\/p>\n Accordingly, it wouldn\u2019t be surprising if Drury is targeting someone who is eligible for a bonus-based structure.\u00a0 The current-year cap charge would be on the lower end and likely offsetable by removing the cap charge of the player he\u2019d be replacing on the roster.\u00a0 (Speculatively, a youngster like Jaroslav Chmelar<\/a> could be a casualty due to his waiver exemption.)\u00a0 While most, if not all, of the achieved bonuses would roll over to 2027-28, that would be a problem to deal with at that time.<\/p>\n The challenge here is that there aren\u2019t many potentially impactful unrestricted free agent forwards who are eligible for bonuses.\u00a0 The threshold is players aged 35 or older, or 400-game players who spent 100 or more days on IR last season.\u00a0 For the latter category, Patrik Laine<\/a> is the only option.\u00a0 A vaunted goalscorer in the past, he played sparingly in Montreal when he was available but at a minimum, he could help a power play.\u00a0 With his injury history, a one-year deal with incentives is his likeliest outcome.<\/p>\n Among the older forwards who could move the needle and receive a deal with incentives, former Ranger Patrick Kane<\/a> stands out as the best option.\u00a0 However, his base salary is still likely more than what New York can afford at the moment while they\u2019re not on his shortlist<\/a> by the looks of things.\u00a0 David Perron<\/a> is starting to slow down but is still a safe bet to score double-digit goals.\u00a0 Adam Henrique<\/a> and Reilly Smith<\/a> are bottom-six pieces that would add a bit of extra depth to the lineup and whose base salaries could wind up being fairly low.<\/p>\n Granted, this is not exactly a particularly deep list but if Drury wants to look at free agency to try to help his team, this might be the pool he\u2019s shopping in unless there are other cap-saving moves in the works first.\u00a0 Given that deals for these types of players don\u2019t typically come until closer to the start of training camp, the Rangers may be waiting for a while before they get a chance to add to their group.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It has been a fairly busy summer for the Rangers who have shaken things up in their forward…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":812364,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[433],"tags":[49,48,751,448,82],"class_list":["post-812363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-new-york-rangers","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812363\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/812364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}