Face it, growing old sucks. Trust me, I know. I'm 59 going on 80. And that's on a good day. I can't imagine what it must feel like to be an athlete and to grow old. The window for a professional athlete is extremely small. Most don't survive for more than a decade without serious decline setting in.
For the better part of 15 years, Henrik Lundqvist has been an elite goaltender who was almost single-handedly responsible for the Rangers advancing to the Stanley Cup finals in 2014. And if his team had managed to protect multiple two-goal leads in games one and two against the Los Angeles Kings, it is quite likely that the Blueshirts would've captured the Cup that year and the King, as he has come to be affectional called, would've been awarded the Conn-Smyth trophy.
Alas, that wasn't the case. The Rangers blew those two-goal leads and with it the series, losing in five. The following year (2014-15) the team won the President's trophy only to lose to the Tampa Bay Lightning in the conference finals. From there, it's been all downhill. Back-to-back early exits in the first and second rounds respectively, followed by a two-year hiatus from the playoffs altogether.
All that brings us to this past season. A young coach and a very young team with an aging goalie, who looks more like a backup than a perineal Vezina trophy winner. Were Lundqvist making what most backups make, he'd be a steal. But with a salary cap hit of $8.5 million, he's a luxury this team can no longer afford.
In an earlier piece, I wrote that the Rangers had approximately $13 million available cap space with which to sign their RFAs and UFAs. In actuality, it's $14 million, so they shouldn't have all that much difficulty, right?
Wrong.
Turns out I neglected to factor in all those ELCs that the team is carrying. What is an ELC, you ask? That would be an entry level contract, and the Rangers have a boat load of them. While on the surface, it may seem as though players on entry level deals are quite cheap insofar as the cap is concerned, if you look under the hood, they're not quite as cheap as you might suspect.
That's because virtually all ELCs carry what's called a performance bonus that if a player hits, entitles him to additional money. And that additional money, as you might expect, gets added to the cap. According to Capfriendly, the Rangers would need to set aside roughy $7 million in cap space if all their ELCs were to hit their bonus levels.
How likely is that to happen? Let's put it this way, would you want to take a chance that Igor Shesterkin wins the Vezina and Kaapo Kakko scores something like 80 points and have to pay out more than $5 million in bonuses between them, only to find out you don't have enough cap room and are now relying on the benevolence of Gary Bettman to avoid what will almost assuredly be a substantial penalty? I sure as shit wouldn't.
So, long story short, that $14 million is now, for all intents and purposes, $7 million, which barely covers the cost of re-signing Ryan Strome and Brendan Lemieux. The former is an absolute must. There's no way this team can afford to go into next season without a number two center, not unless you think Filip Chytil is ready to assume those duties. And from what we saw last season, that would be an enormous risk, one that the franchise would be reckless to take. You don't commit $11 million a year to arguably the best left wing in the NHL in Artemi Panarin and not have a legitimate center to feed him the puck. Strome and Panarin were - to coin a phrase from the movie Forrest Gump - peas and carrots. You don't split that pair up unless you're pretty damn sure you have someone in the wings who can step right in and assume the role.
So let's say Strome agrees to a two-year bridge deal for $5 million a year, and Lemieux re-signs for, say, $2 million. Now what? You're at your cap limit, and you still have at least two players left to sign. Without shedding some salary, you're basically rolling the dice hoping your young players under perform. But what would be the point of that? Either these last three years have been worth it or they haven't. The truth is nothing would accelerate this rebuild more than to see Kakko have a breakout season alongside Mika Zibanejad and Chris Kreider.
And let's not forget, there will be one pretty substantial young player joining the team next season: Alexis Lafreniere, the overall number one pick. And unless the scouting reports on this kid are severely off, he will likely hit his performance bonus with room to spare, meaning the Rangers would need to set aside at least $2 million for him, not the standard $925,000.
You can see where this is going. If it sucks getting old, imagine what it must be like being the GM of the second youngest team in the league with a lot of holes to fill and not enough available cap space to fill them.
That's why it is imperative that the Rangers buy out Lundqvist's contract. Sure it adds more dead cap space to an already mountainous total, but Gorton has no other choice. He needs the $3 million in cap relief to help him fill out his roster, and even then, he'll have to get creative.
This is the part of the game nobody likes. A player who has given everything he can for an organization that came up short twice and is now on the verge of putting together a core that will hopefully be together for many years, is now the square peg in a round hole, and that sucks. If there was another way to do this, I'm sure the Rangers would've found it by now.
He isn't going to retire, nor should he, and in a league with a flat cap and with several teams needing to shed salary themselves, no one is going to trade for a 38 year-old goaltender that is at least two years removed from elite status. Even with the Rangers picking up half the tab, you're still talking about $2.75 million. Think about it this way: the Rangers will likely have to fork over $2 million just to re-sign Alexandar Georgiev, and he's 24. Get the idea?
It's been a nice career for Hendrik Lundqvist; a brilliant career, in fact. As I've said before, he's the best Ranger never to win a Stanley Cup, but it's time to move on. Gorton knows it and so does Lundqvist.
Parting is such sweet sorrow, especially when it's bittersweet.
Post script,
Breaking News: the Rangers announced Saturday that they have traded defenseman Marc Staal and a 2021 second-round draft pick to the Detroit Red Wings in exchange for future considerations. Staal was in the final year of a contract that paid him $5.7 million. Detroit was able to absorb the full amount of Staal's cap hit because they were significantly under the minimum and actually needed to add salary.
Given this development, the Rangers might decided not to buy out Lundqvist but I would still do it. The added cap space would help them acquire a solid left-handed defense partner for Jacob Trouba - Vince Dunn? - and allow them to re-sign Tony DeAngelo who had a good year offensively last season.
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