NHL

Rangers’ spare parts prevent them from getting Stars’ Richards

When the Rangers meet the Senators at the Garden tonight, winger Todd White and defenseman Matt Gilroy are likely to resume their positions as healthy scratches.

This means, as is customary when the remaining 17 skaters are healthy, the Rangers will have players taking up $4.125 million of cap space in civilian clothes.

This comes at a cost beyond dollars.

The longer general manager Glen Sather keeps such expensive spares on the roster, the more difficult it will become to deal for the Stars’ Brad Richards once the financially distressed franchise yields to reality and seeks to move the impending free agent blue-chip center.

The more difficult, in fact, it will become to acquire any substantial player as long as the Ragners, $1.544 million under the cap, carry this type of excess at the approximate price of $22,500 per day for their scratches.

Dallas would prefer to sign Richards, in at $7.8 million, to a contract extension, but the absence of an owner would seem to make that impossible before July. As such, even as the Stars contend in the Western Conference, GM Joe Nieuwendyk probably will have to reach out to clubs that Richards, who holds a no-trade clause, would approve for a move.

The Rangers assuredly would be on that list. But the math and the possible lack of a match — understand that Sather will not send valued young assets to Dallas for a player who all but certainly will be there for the taking on July 1 — might mitigate against such a deal.

The league’s Board of Governors convenes tomorrow for the first day of meetings in Florida. It’s likely that Sather, whose hunt for a lefty defenseman has become less urgent with the steady development and improvement of the Steve Eminger-Michael Sauer third pair, will initiate a chat with Nieuwendyk.

The fact, though, is that the Rangers not only do not have the space now for Richards, it will be a task for Sather to create it before the Feb. 28 trade deadline.

*

Perhaps John Tortorella and Chris Drury have some sort of bizarre shared death wish because that’s about the only way to explain the decision to permit the impaired captain to jump in on the PK unit while the Rangers were working on their power play during yesterday’s practice.

That’s penalty-killing, which presents the possibility of, oh, breaking a finger by blocking a shot or getting in the way of an errant pass, though nothing like that ever happens, or at least not too often.

Drury, whose fractured left index finger is not fully healed and who has not been cleared to shoot the puck, participated in rushes before joining the PK. But sanity, in the form of trainer Jim Ramsay, soon prevailed.

“I had him down there killing penalties for a little bit, but then Rammer came and pulled him off the ice,” Tortorella ruefully acknowledged. “He’s still a couple of weeks away.

“As badly as he wants to play, we have to do the right thing. He has to be fully capable. It’s all good news, but there has to be patience.”

And no practice penalty killing.

*

There was no league action taken against Ryan Callahan for Friday’s first-period elbow to Islander Frans Nielsen’s head. . . It is believed that Rangers will ask the NHL to investigate Friday’s pre-game warmup during which Jon Sim appeared to shoot a puck at Sean Avery.

larry.brooks@nypost.com