Long term salary cap issues facing the Rangers
By Steve Paulus
The risk
Mika Zibanejad signed his first contact as a RFA with Ottawa for a yearly cap hit of about $900k. That contract expired one year after his trade to New York and as a RFA, he signed a five year, $26.75 million deal in 2017 with an AAV of $5.35 million. Considering what he has accomplished, he’s a steal at that salary. In hindsight, Jeff Gorton probably wishes he had inked Zibanejad for the maximum eight years at a slightly higher rate. That’s an example of an outstanding deal that could have been even better.
On the other hand, look at Brady Skjei. Coming off his ELC in the summer of 2018, Gorton inked Skjei to a six year, $31.5 million contract with an AAV of $5.25 million. This was after an outstanding rookie season and a sophomore season that saw him regress a bit. Gorton rolled the dice, believing that Skjei would continue to develop and be a $5 million-a-year bargain a few years into the deal. Instead, Skjei’s play continued to suffer and that annual cap hit became a problem, resulting in his trade to the Carolina Hurricanes, a deal made strictly for cap relief purposes.
When teams sign players like Skjei and it doesn’t work out, it has a ripple effect. Because of the Skjei salary (along with the Staal and Smith contracts), last summer when Gorton was confronted with three RFA’s in Buchnevich, DeAngelo and Lemieux, he signed Buchnevich to a two-year $6.5 million bridge deal while offering DeAngelo and Lemieux $925k for one year, an offer they had to take.
In hindsight, getting DeAngelo on a bridge deal would have been the wise course, but Gorton’s hands were tied and he chose to spend his budget on Buchnevich instead of the defenseman. Now, the New Jersey native is an arbitration eligible RFA who will be looking for a monster increase after he elevated his game to the top tier of NHL defensemen.
And that’s why everyone will be watching Jacob Trouba. At $8 million a year, if he develops into one of the top blueliners in the NHL, he will be considered fairly compensated. If he doesn’t, the deal could be a disaster.