The New York Rangers Struggles with the Salary Cap
After going through a four-year rebuild where the organization traded away aging, expensive stars for younger, cheaper talent, the New York Rangers are one of the youngest and brightest teams in the NHL. Despite having just entered the window of competing for the Stanley Cup, the Rangers already find themselves in salary cap hell, not because they gave out bad contracts to their new stars, but because they got unlucky with the timing of their rebuild.
The Rangers’ rebuild began before Covid-19 changed the landscape of the NHL and did not finish until after the salary cap was significantly altered for the immediate future.
The Rangers are currently experiencing the aftermath of the 2020 CBA extension, where the NHL and the NHLPA agreed to extend the Collective Bargaining Agreement through 2025-26. This extension meant the salary cap remained stagnant for two years, following average yearly growth of 3.48% over the previous six years. In the 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons the upper limit of the salary cap in the NHL was set at $81.5 million the same as the 2019-20 season.
This spelled trouble for teams who spent big in the summer before the 2019-2020 season or gave players long-term, high AAV extensions during the 2019 season.
NHL contracts are all about predicting a player’s future value compared to future salary cap growth. Say I am a team looking to sign a player to a long-term contract. The player’s AAV can be higher than his market value when the contract is first signed, but over time, if the player continues to get better and be an asset to the team, the contract will give some salary cap flexibility as the total salary cap increases.
Take Vincent Trocheck, for example. Formerly of the Carolina Hurricanes, Trocheck signed with the Rangers earlier this offseason to a seven-year contract with an AAV of $5.625 million. Right now that is consistent with the other team’s second-line centers, like former Rangers Ryan Strome, who signed a five-year $25 million contract with the Anaheim Ducks this offseason, and Andrew Copp, who signed a five-year contract (with the same $5.625 million AAV as Trocheck) with his hometown team, the Detroit Redwings.
Given Trochek’s career thus far, there is a strong possibility that, barring injury, he will be a solid center option for the Rangers in four years or five years. At this time, the salary cap will likely grow to a point where this $5.625 million AAV is more in the ballpark of third-line center money, not second-line center money.