Should Bo Horvat be on the New York Rangers’ wish-list?

What would it take for the Rangers to pull off a trade for Horvat?

Horvat is entering a contract year with the Canucks and he will carry a cap hit of $5,500,000 in 2022-23. As mentioned above, there’s very little wriggle room with the cap for Vancouver after signing Miller to an extension. They also have to work out new deals for the likes of Boeser, Pettersson, and Podkolzin within the next couple of years.

As a result, Horvat could find himself the odd man when we come to the start of the 2023-24 season, the year he will become a free agent. If the Canucks can’t find the dollars to give him a raise on his current deal, then there will be teams in the NHL who would be willing to do so. After all, legit top-six centers are hard to come by. They don’t exactly grow on trees.

If we get to the Trade Deadline and talks have stalled between the two camps, then the Canucks may decide it best to move on from their Captain and get something in return rather than lose him for nothing come the offseason. In that scenario, they would no doubt be looking for a bumper package featuring picks, prospects, and maybe a ready-now NHL player.

The Rangers certainly have all of those pieces in order to execute a trade for Horvat. They have the picks to make a deal work, they have a bounty of prospects they could move, including defenseman Nils Lundkvist if they don’t trade him elsewhere, and they could even throw in a Kakko or a Chytil to any potential deal if they needed to add a sweetener.

The tricky part for the Rangers would be fitting Horvat’s current AAV into the cap and then signing him to a long-term extension. Like the Canucks, they are right up against the cap and, per CapFriendly, they have just over $1 million in cap space heading into Training Camp.

However, they are projected to have around $4.5 million in cap space at the Trade Deadline and, with all of their Dead Cap money coming off the books after this season, they will have more money to play with next offseason. As a result, they could move a couple of things around in order to squeeze Horvat’s current AAV under the cap this year, and then they would have the means to thrash out a long-term extension for next year.

Overall, the Rangers are perfectly placed to win now with a young core and they need to take advantage before that window shrinks and then completely closes. Going out and making an aggressive trade for Horvat, and then signing him to a new deal, would not only bolster their strength and quality down the middle and make this lineup considerably better, but it would also send a message to the rest of the NHL that the New York Rangers really do mean business in 2022-23 and beyond. It is one of those swing-for-the-fences types of moves that would be worth paying a steep cost for in terms of how it would benefit this team on and off the ice.