OTTAWA, Ontario — Chris Drury stated he wished to string the needle for the Rangers forward of Friday’s 3 p.m. commerce deadline.
To take action in a season that has been tough to seek out hope in however is just not but hopeless, the Rangers president and common supervisor strived to make strikes that made essentially the most sense for the long run whereas not sacrificing the staff’s competitiveness for this ultimate 20-game push to qualify for the 2024-25 playoffs.
“Trying to make sure we got some assets back for our [unrestricted free agents] for the future, whether it’s a young player like [Brendan] Brisson or some picks, another young player in [Juuso] Parssinen, while trying to show the group I still believe in them — which I do,” Drury stated on a convention name with reporters a pair hours after the deadline handed. “As we push to the playoffs, push to try and make the playoffs and give them some NHL players in [Calvin] de Haan, Parssinen, [Carson] Soucy this last week to try and help the group get to the playoffs.”
After leveraging three of their impending unrestricted free brokers — Ryan Lindgren, Jimmy Vesey and Reilly Smith — in a few trades earlier this week that restocked some draft/prospect capital and padded the protection, signing in-season acquisition Urho Vaakanainen to a two-year extension with a median annual worth of $1.55 million was Drury’s foremost order of enterprise on Friday.
That’s as a result of all that Drury wished to perform had already been achieved earlier this week.
The one different transfer Drury made on Friday was an AHL participant change with the Sabres, wherein he despatched Erik Brannstrom — acquired with J.T. Miller from Vancouver on Jan. 31 — to Buffalo in change for Nicolas Aube-Kubel.
Aube-Kubel, who comes with 301 video games of NHL expertise over 9 seasons, will report back to the staff’s AHL affiliate, the Hartford Wolf Pack.
So all of the Rangers on the MSG Coaching Middle ice Friday afternoon boarded the staff airplane to Ottawa.
That included Chris Kreider, who remains to be the longest tenured Ranger after listening to his title on the commerce block since November.
The truth that he’s on injured reserve along with his third separate damage of the season actually affected his commerce worth, however The Submit’s Larry Brooks reported the Rangers weren’t essentially procuring Kreider, simply listening.
“I’m certainly not going to get into any private talks I have with other teams on players or anything else, but I’m really excited Chris is here,” Drury stated. “He’s been a terrific Ranger for a long time. In some ways, if and when he does plays — hopefully, which is relatively soon — it’ll be almost like a trade-deadline acquisition with him and Adam [Fox coming off IR]. We all know what Chris is capable of and when he’s on his game, he impacts our lineup in a big-time way.”
The Rangers have made six notable trades since Dec. 6, a sign of the retooling that’s primarily been within the works since former captain Jacob Trouba was despatched to Anaheim.
The staff that may finish this season will look a heck of lots totally different than the one which began it.
With an abundance of gamers set to change into restricted free brokers this summer time, this looks like solely the start of a number of modifications for the Rangers.
“We looked at a lot of different things,” Drury stated when requested if he was wanting to make use of extra of the simply over $13.4 million cap house the Rangers nonetheless have. “Some of those opportunities came up. Obviously, the trades we made, made sense. Some of the other stuff that we looked at didn’t make sense. We’re always just trying to make the best decisions we can with the information we have. This is what we ended up doing.”
