New York Rangers: What to do with Brendan Smith?

Should he stay or should he go? Brendan Smith is proving to be an intriguing enigma for the New York Rangers heading into the offseason.

Now deep into a rebuild which looks to be trending in the right direction, the New York Rangers will have a decision to make on a player who can arguably and, perhaps fairly, be described as perplexing.

Brought to the Big Apple from the Detroit Red Wings on Feb. 28. 2017 in exchange for a third-round pick in the 2017 draft and a 2018 second-round selection, Smith made an initial bright impression in a Rangers jersey.

Bringing some brute force and a dollop of grittiness to the blueline, the defenseman was a reliable presence for the Blueshirts in the 2017 playoffs and he was rewarded for his string of accomplished performances that summer with a four-year contract worth $17.4 million.

However, that lucrative new deal proved to an albatross around Smith’s neck with his game embarking on a sudden and rapid downward spiral.

Despite finishing 2017-18 with a Plus/Minus rating of +2, Smith only put eight points up (one goal, seven assists) in just 44 games and he endured a myriad of bumps in a rocky year.

Reporting to training camp out of shape, the left-shot was benched for six games in a row during the early throes of the season, before being placed on waivers in Feb. 2018 in a shocking move.

And the worse was still to come.

Demoted to the Hartford Wolf Pack, the Rangers’ AHL affiliate team, Smith sunk to new lows when he broke his hand during a fight with teammate Vinni Lettieri in practice, perhaps best encapsulating his dramatic fall from grace.

As Rocky once famously said, though, ‘it ain’t how hard you hit, it’s how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.’

Determined to prove that his career wasn’t on a downward spiral and 2017-18 was indeed a blip, Smith trimmed down during the summer and returned to training camp in 2018-19 ready to hit the ground running under new head coach David Quinn.

Although it won’t go down as a vintage year for Smith, it can still be considered a bounce-back year of sorts.

In the first half of the season his game was littered with far too many individual mistakes, ranging from dumb penalties to boneheaded giveaways.

However, as the season progressed, Quinn found a role for Smith that seemed to fit.

Finishing the season with a Plus/Minus rating of -7 won’t grab too many positive headlines of course, but what will is Smith’s versatility.

In order to get playing time for a number of the Rangers’ plethora of young defensemen in the latter stages of 2018-19, Quinn opted to plug Smith in as a fourth-line forward on more than a handful of occasions.

And it was in a bottom-six left-wing role where the 30-year-old played arguably his best hockey of the year, morphing into a reliable and experienced utility player for Quinn and finishing the season with four goals and nine assists for 13 points, his highest points total since 2015-16.

Smith is signed through until 2021 so the Rangers now have a decision to make; do they keep Smith on the roster as a role player or do they look to trade or buy him out?

The cons

One of the biggest negatives in keeping Smith around during the rebuild is of course his contract.

He is signed through until 2021 with an annual cap hit of $4,350,000. The Rangers have $20 million in cap space with which to play with this offseason so they hardly need to scrimp, but that’s not the point.

It is still a lot of money to shell out on a player who won’t log up mega minutes and put up monster offensive production night in and night out.

There is also the bad decision making and sloppy errors that can plague Smith’s game, particularly when he is in his natural habitat on the blueline.

He is 30-years-old so he is starting to see a natural decline in his game too, and that will only continue the deeper he gets into this contract.

Smith is already behind Kevin Shattenkirk, Brady Skjei, Tony DeAngelo and Neal Pionk on the depth chart and, with the boatload of young blueliners in the ilk of Hajek, Lindgren and possibly Yegor Rykov waiting in the wings to play regularly, it will be even harder for Smith to find ice time in the last two years of his contract.

The Verdict

Taking everything into account, some would be tempted to try and buy out Smith if you go on the hard numbers alone, although a buyout would have an impact on the cap for four additional years.

However, the eye test is just as important these days and, although he shouldn’t be considered a huge piece in this rebuild, Smith demonstrated in the second-half of 2018-19 that he can be relied upon as a depth utility player.

Yes, his contract is a tough one to swallow but for the next two years at least Smith is still young enough to make an impact on this roster be that as a bottom line forward or a bottom pair defenseman, and his experience will be vital when it comes to helping the franchise’s deluge of young talent.

As perplexing as he is, there is upside to keeping Brendan Smith on Broadway for now.