The Rangers’ cap situation is very, very bad

The 2022-23 season

One key assumption is that the salary cap will remain at $81.5 million for the 2022-23 season. At this point, it’s extremely doubtful that it will even go up by a million dollars.

The Rangers’ cap hit for 2022-23 will be $51,338,302 for six forwards, six defensemen and one goalie.  That includes our contract projections for Shesterkin ($5 million), Chytil ($2.5 million) and Nemeth ($2.5 million) as well as $3,427,778 in dead space from buyouts.

That leaves the team with $30,161,698 in cap space for the 2022-23 season.  While that seems like a lot, here’s who needs to be signed or replaced.

Mika Zibanejad, Adam Fox, Kaapo Kakko, Vitali Kravtsov, Ryan Strome, Sammy Blais, Kevin Rooney, Julien Gauthier, Libor Hajek Tony Bitetto and Alexandar Georgiev.

There’s been a lot of speculation that the Rangers will sign Adam Fox long term so we will project an eight-year, $9 million AAV.   That drops the available cap space to $21,168,698.   Simply put, that’s not enough money to sign or replace half of the players on this list.

The math means that if the Rangers can get Zibanejad to re-up at a team friendly rate, they have to allow Strome to depart as a UFA or he will be traded at the deadline. They will have to try to trade Georgiev. They will have to sign Kravtsov and Kakko to bridge deals and will have to go to the bargain bin to replace players like Rooney and Blais.

Beyond 2023-24

It doesn’t get much better in the future.  In 2023-24 it will Alexis Lafrenière’s turn for a big payday.  K’Andre Miller will be coming off his ELC as well and he may be looking for a substantial increase.

The Rangers have to hope that prospects like Will Cuylle, Karl Henriksson and Lauri Pajuniemi are NHL ready and can contribute.

The reason the situation doesn’t get better is that 36% of the team’s salary cap space is tied up in long term contracts for Artemi Panarin, Jacob Trouba, Chris Kreider and Barclay Goodrow at least through 2026.   The fact is that three of those contracts were signed before the COVID-19 pandemic when the projection was that the salary cap would increase  to as much as $88.2 million.  There is no way that Panarin, Trouba and Kreider would have gotten as much as they did in a post-pandemic world.

But it wasn’t just big contracts that hurt the Rangers, their good luck in the draft didn’t help when it came to finding help at center.