Do the Rangers have the cap space they need to get better?

The Rangers’ cap situation

As of today, the Rangers have a projected cap hit of $58,609,801, leaving them with $22,890,199 in cap space.  That includes 10 forwards, seven defensemen and two goalies for a total of 19 players under contract for 2021-22.

The team has five Restricted Free Agents (RFA’s) who need to be re-signed with two of them, Pavel Buchnevich and Igor Shesterkin, eligible for arbitration.  There are two Unrestricted Free Agents (UFA’s), Brendan Smith and Phil Di Giuseppe,  who probably won’t be back.

Included in the cap hit is $4,044,444 in dead cap space due to the buyouts of Henrik Lundqvist, Kevin Shattenkirk and Dan Girardi.

So, the Rangers have almost $23 million to spend on signing their RFA’s and any UFA’s that they want to target.   Well, not really.  There are some things that are definitely going to change.

Changes looming

There are a few things on the horizon that are guaranteed.  The first is that the Rangers will definitely buy out Tony DeAngelo as soon as they get past the expansion draft.  Buying him out will leave the Rangers with  a $383,334 dead space cap hit next season, but it will save them $4,416,666 from DeAngelo’s salary, increasing their cap space to $27,306,865.

While that is good news, there is another issue for the Rangers and that is a potential carryover performance bonus hit.  Those numbers won’t be calculated until we get closer to July 28, but there are two issues that could affect the Rangers’ salary cap.

This season the team had a performance bonus exposure of $8.35 million.  Next season the team has an exposure of $7.55 million in performance bonuses.  This season, teams were allowed to pay out $6,112,500 in performance bonuses without it affecting the cap.  Anything paid over that total is added to the next year’s salary cap and the possible hit is $2,237,500.

What we don’t know is how much of that $8.35 million was actually earned in 2020-21. We can be pretty sure that Adam Fox got his $850k and K’Andre Miller earned hi $300k.  But what about Kaapo Kakko and his $2.65 million in bonus money?   Did Alexis Lafrenière or Igor Shesterkin earn their total of $2.85 million each in performance bonuses?    Was the 20 games Vitali Kravtsov played enough to trigger the $850k in bonus money for him?

The bottom line is it’s possible that the $27,306,865 in cap space could drop by as much as $2.2 million.  But how much will they need to pay their pending free agents?