The Rangers take the ice this afternoon against the Kraken with their franchise goalie officially locked up for eight years. In addition, despite being two days beyond the trade of their former captain Jacob Trouba, the locker room will continue to need additional time to adapt to the new normal, where there are five players with an A on their jersey and no one wearing the C. New York faces Chicago tomorrow and have a chance if they can win today and tomorrow to start to smooth the waters and rebuild their confidence.
Rangers lineup today vs. Kraken:
Panarin-Trocheck-Lafrenière
Kreider-Zibanejad-Smith
Cuylle-Chytil-Kakko
Edström-Carrick-Vesey
Lindgren-Fox
Miller-Schneider
Jones-Mancini
Quick
Garard
Scratches: Berard (upper-body injury), Mackey, Brodzinski, Shesterkin (wife in labor)
A few thoughts:
1)
Jacob Trouba - GM Chris Drury used his leverage as GM as Trouba's complete NMC ended last offseason ro tell Trouba accept one of the deals we have on the table or be waived and lose all control as to where you land. The media and others have taken Drury to task for this move as well as the Barclay Goodrow waiving with the narrative that transactions like this where players are in essence viewed as chattel will limit who would want to come to New York in the future. The view is understandable, on the face of it, handling players and people like this is distasteful. It's clear that what happened this summer with Trouba adversely impacted him and the locker room. Drury's decision to act now was a way to try and save the season before it spiraled even further out of control.
Personally, yeah, it's distasteful, and yes, in a perfect world, business and personal life could remain conjoined. But in sports, as much as we might like to be the case, that is a panacea. That said, Trouba's comments after the trade were understandable. He felt violated, he felt like he was tossed aside and that it wasn't handled correctly. Trouba rightfully placed family first. In this situation, that being the case started the adverse feelings between the two sides and Trouba's inability to be the leader he once was.
Trouba admitted that he was adversely affected by all that happened. His leadership on-and-off the ice was impacted as much as might have wanted to segregate business and performance. Drury decided that a separation needed to happen now. Anaheim was a team discussed over the summer, while Detroit at one point was in the mix, but they couldn't free up enough cap room, while discussions with Columbus broke down.
"I'll be honest, I was put in a position this summer to make a decision between my career and my family and I chose my family. I would choose my family 100 times over again. I don't feel bad about that. I was happy about it. I don't like that it was made public necessarily or how everything unfolded so publicly, but I guess that's part of New York and what happens. It made it difficult to play kind of what that hanging over everything. The result is the result. I'm happy with moving forward, but I'm not overly thrilled with how it went down. In my opinion, things could've been handled better. I'm not blaming anybody or anything, just kind of how it happened I thought was kind of unfortunate."
Skjei Stadium summed up Trouba quite well in the comments on the prior blog:
Trouba is slow and his attempts at big hits take him out of position a decent amount. He has been paired with a number of different partners, especially this year, and the underlying numbers show that most of his partners have been better away from him than with him.
On the flipside, he is a very good penalty killer and blocks a lot of shots. He does have a big shot from the point but his deployment here never matched his deployment in his final years in Winnipeg because we have Fox so he mostly played on our PP2 which is a huge step down from our PP1 and he wasn’t very impressive there. On a PP where he is more of a shot and less of a QB he could be ok
He clearly lost a little passion this year given the circus that went on the past few months but he’s a good leader and by all accounts a good guy and should be a positive influence in the room for your younger players.
Victor Mancini gets a chance to be the sixth d-man while Braden Schneider moves up to the top-four permanently. Mancini has to play more than 11 minutes, though that number is skewed a bit due to the three power plays for and four against. But, coach Peter Laviolette and Phil Housley have to allocate the minutes properly.
2)
Shesterkin signs - when I saw the number Saturday am, I was pretty ecstatic. Given that he already turned down $11 mil a year over eight years and was rumored to be asking for $12-13 mil per year, getting him at $11.5 mil per is fairly solid. But when I heard some of the terms associated with the contract, it became clearer why the deal landed as it did. There are certainly aspects of the deal I am not happy about.
As the NY Post noted, if the 2025-26 cap is set at the projected $92.4 million, Shesterkin’s contract will account for 12.44 percent of the total. Artemi Panarin, who remains the highest-paid player in franchise history at $11,642,857 per, accounted for 14.29 percent of the cap in his first year in New York. When Henrik Lundqvist’s final contract kicked in in 2014-15, the King accounted for 12.32 percent of the cap while earning $8.5 million per. This is most certainly part of the good.
This contract is basically buyout proof. If anything goes off the rails, New York is basically stuck with the full term of the contract due to most of the money being a signing bonus. Now, frontloading the deal might have made it easier to move him in the future. However, with a full NMC, good luck with that happening. So the slight "savings" in terms of $ from a cap space perspective gets lost in the NMC and way the contract is structured.
All that said. New York has certainty between the pipes, continuing the netmining legacy of the franchise. Igor made a commitment to the team and the team made a huge commitment to Igor. Now, building around him will be key. With the Trouba deal, NY has cap space this season. Plus, with Igor maybe being a $1 million less than expected, that too can be used to improve the team in front of him.
3)
Today's game: Igor's wife is in labor so Jonathan Quick will be between the pipes. If Igor is not ready to go tomorrow, Dylan Garand could get his first start for the Rangers, Brett Berard is still dealing with the upper body injury that occurred on Kirby Dach's hit. As such, the lineup will be the same as Friday, where Mika Zibanejad had his best game in weeks. His whole line did, even without Reilly Smith's game winning goal. Artemi Panarin looks to remain hot while I want to see what K'Andre Miller brings in his second game paired with Braden Schneider.
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