A salary cap windfall for the New York Rangers?

The New York Rangers salary cap crunch may have been greatly exaggerated.

The New York Rangers have spent the off-season tiptoeing around their self induced salary cap restrictions. The buyout of Henrik Lundqvist’s final year added to the teams dead cap space, brining the total to $12,994,444. The team also took a major cap hit from Entry Level Contract (ELC) performance bonuses.

Players like Alexis Lafreniere, Kaapo Kaako and Igor Shesterkin signed ELC’s with max level bonuses attached, each potentially worth an additional $2,850,000 on top of their $925,000 base salary.  Although at lesser values, Adam Fox, Ryan Lindgren, Filip Chytil and Julien Gauthier could all potentially receive bonus payouts as well. Taken all together, the New York Rangers could potentially owe $10,062,500 in performance bonuses.

The NHL allows teams a 7.5% bonus carryover, equal to $6,112,500 of the $81,500,000 salary cap. Whereby, if a team exceeds the season long salary cap due to performance bonus pay outs, the overage amount would be charged against the following years cap. For teams in excess of this allowance, even though it is only potential money due, they are charged a bonus cushion penalty against the current years cap for that excess amount.

In the case of the 2020-21 New York Rangers, the team has been forced to hold back $3,950,000 in cap towards the bonus cushion penalty. This increased the dead cap space for the season to $16,944,444, leaving the team with just $64,555,556 in cap to ice a team with and stay cap compliant. This is a prime reason why the team was not a serious player in the unrestricted free agent (UFA) market this off-season.

This may all seem rather bleak, but news came out Sunday evening from PuckPedia and was retweeted by @statboysteven last night that brings good news to Rangerstown.

Although still waiting for confirmation as of this writing, this is very interesting news. Players like Mikael Granlund, Mike Hoffman, Sami Vatanen, Michael Grabner and Andreas Athanasiou are still available on the UFA market. Could either they, or any other current UFA be signed by the Rangers? Or perhaps the better question is, should the New York Rangers be looking to sign anyone?

In truth, the salary cap now saved would be better spent by not spending it. This newly found cap should be saved for prospects they hope will make the team, if not straight out of camp, then as the season progresses. When including their potential performance bonuses, K’Andre Miller, Tarmo Reunanen, Vitali Kravtsov and Morgan Barron combined equal $5,750,000 in cap space. Part of the total would be offset by moving the players they replace, but every penny counts.

Additionally, saving the excess cap now would protect next season’s cap by reducing the potential performance bonus carryover from roughly six million to two million. Unfortunately, we will not know anything definitively until the NHL releases their final financials as part of the Memorandum of Understanding.  However, keeping cap in order to better build the team from within is the far better option.