After months of deliberation, Rangers general manager Glen Sather finally found a suitor for Michael Del Zotto, trading the 23-year-old defenseman to the Predators on Wednesday in exchange for Kevin Klein.
Klein, 29, is a bigger, stay-at-home defenseman and a right-handed shot, one of the most important things Sather was looking for as he pursued and fielded offers for the struggling Del Zotto. Klein carries a $2.9 million annual salary-cap hit through the 2017-18 season, almost a wash with Del Zotto’s $2.55 million.
Del Zotto, the No. 20 overall pick by the Blueshirts in the 2008 draft and once-wunderkind when he won Rookie of the Month after his league debut in 2009, will be a restricted free agent come this summer.
“I suppose we did look at that from every angle possible — this isn’t a deal that happened this morning,” Sather said on a conference call. “It’s been in conversation for quite a while. There is always a possibility, the uncertainty of the future.
“Having a player of [Klein’s] caliber and experience under contract until he’s 34 makes a lot of sense to us, especially with the market and the way it’s going and seemingly the way people think it’s going to go. It made a lot of sense from a hockey point of view and financial point of view.
“We needed to have a right-handed defenseman, and we only had two of them. It made a lot of sense.”
Of course, one of those right-handed defensemen is Dan Girardi, the looming unrestricted free agent who has been a bedrock player for the Rangers over the past seven years. With the salary cap set to rise from this season’s $64.3 million to around $71.1 million for next season, the idea Sather alluded to was that prices for players in high demand — the most highly of those being solid, right-handed defenseman — is going to skyrocket. Also in that group for the Rangers is second-pair right-hander Anton Stralman.
But most notably, the 29-year-old Girardi surely will be looking for a large raise on his current $3.325 million annual cap hit, and if his demands prove to be too pricey before the March 5 trade deadline, there is little question Sather will have a large portion of the league knocking down his door asking for Girardi.
“I think I’ve said this before: We want to re-sign all of these players, and we’d like to get it done before the season is finished if we can,” said Sather, who also has the task of trying to re-sign captain Ryan Callahan, a winger. “We’ve had discussions with their agents and hopefully we will get it done. But this does give us a little more insurance on that side, so you have to look to the future as well when you do make these deals.”
What Sather got in Klein was someone who is not about to replace Girardi, but could at least push Stralman for that top-four role, even when he starts Thursday night’s Garden match against the Blues on the third pair with lefty John Moore.
Klein, listed at 6-foot-1 and 199 pounds, had just one goal and two assists in 47 games this season for the Predators, averaging 18:48 of ice time per game, fourth-most on the team. The Kitchener, Ont., native has a total of 16 goals and 66 assists over 403 regular-season games.
“He’s smart, the coaches know him from the teams they’ve been coaching before,” said Sather, whose first-year coach, Alain Vigneault, spent years facing Klein while behind the Vancouver bench. “So they know what they’re getting. They know who he is, they know how he plays. They’re quite comfortable with him.”
The Del Zotto saga is now over, and Sather and his team can begin to plan their future without him.
“I don’t want to criticize Michael — he had a couple great years, he had a couple of interesting years here that didn’t work out the way he or we planned,” Sather said. “But people change, the atmosphere changes, and we have to change with the times. That’s just the way it worked out.”
Vigneault made it clear goalie Henrik Lundqvist will start Thursday against the Blues, and said if he “were a betting man” Lundqvist will play both of the outdoor games at Yankee Stadium: Sunday afternoon against the Devils and next Wednesday night against the Islanders. Lundqvist missed Tuesday’s 5-3 loss to the Islanders because of illness, but returned to practice Wednesday and is expected to be ready, along with his new pinstriped pads and mask.