New York Rangers: Leave the kids down on the farm
The New York Rangers need to be smart about their roster decisions going down the stretch. This will not be easy to say, but the team cannot waste cheap talent.
The hardest part about continuously winning in the NHL is the salary cap. In fact, the Rangers even struggled to maintain a good team without a cap prior the 2004-2005 lockout. The key to navigating the league post-lockout is featuring young talent on entry level contracts around established stars. This is the most affordable way to maintain a winner and it often prices established talent out of range for contenders.
This is a trend across all salary cap sports and it has several noticeable impacts. The realities of a salary cap game are harsh and make sentimentality way too costly. This habit of paying players based on their past track record and not what they will do in the future has hamstrung the Rangers in the cases of both Dan Girardi and Marc Staal.
As a whole, it also makes capitalizing on young talent on entry level contracts vital to success. Right now, the Rangers are riding a wave of several key contributors being on either their entry-level contracts or a bridge deal. A bridge deal is a contract after the player’s first contract that is essentially an opportunity to prove themselves to be worth more money. This type of deal is usually only for one or two seasons.
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The players currently on their entry-level or bridge contracts will be the team’s core going forward. It is the young players like Brady Skjei, Kevin Hayes, J.T Miller and Jimmy Vesey that are currently paid less than what they would get on the open market. The league is constructed this way to keep the wages of draft picks down to make them easier for teams to control.
The two number ones
Aside from the aforementioned players on the NHL roster, the Rangers have a pair of prospects sitting in Hartford who are NHL ready. Both of the team’s first-round picks from last season, Filip Chytil and Lias Andersson, could play in the show right now. There is an argument to be made that the team has nothing to lose at this point.
The problem lies in the fact that there seem to be two very different mindsets within the team. The explosive Larry Brooks article from January 26th that said the Rangers were going to blow it all up and sell off their veterans. This is in direct contrast to the comments Head Coach Alain Vigneault made Wednesday at practice. The Rangers’ coach made the team’s target to make the playoffs roughly 96 points.
It is absolutely crucial that the Rangers do not try to fool themselves into thinking they’re serious contenders. Going forward with a fire sale is the best course of action that will yield the best results. The team will not fix its problems if they somehow eke out a postseason spot.
Should the team go full rebuild the organization would be wise to keep Andersson and Chytil in Hartford. This is a cheap decision, reminiscent of something the New York Mets would do, but it is good business. Keeping two marquee young talents under team control for an extra season helps the team shape its long-term future.
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The Rangers need to fully commit to the long-term this season. If they were to call up Chytil and Andersson they’d be hurting the overall plan because it’d be a year sooner to both needing pay raises. In a salary cap sport paying 21-year-olds more than an entry-level contract does not make sense. Keep the kids down on the farm, play out the season and sell at the deadline. The future will be infinitely brighter if they do.