When assistant coach Ulf Samuelsson begins working with the Rangers at training camp, the veteran of 16 NHL seasons will impart two fundamental principles to his defensemen:
“No one screening the goaltender and no getting rebounds,” is how the one-time Blueshirt described his “ideal defensive environment” Wednesday after the third day of the club’s prospect camp.
Samuelsson, who spent the last two seasons as head coach of Modo Hockey in Sweden after four years as an assistant in Phoenix under first Wayne Gretzky and then Dave Tippett, will join former Winnipeg head coach Scott Arniel, and perhaps another aide as well, on Alain Vigneault’s staff.
“I’m not at all where I want to be on tactical and knowledge of the Rangers, but I have my computer loaded and it’s going to be a busy summer,” said Samuelsson, who played nearly four seasons for the Blueshirts in the late-’90s. “I think there’s great potential here and can be a very successful few years for me here, looking at the roster.”
It is incumbent on the Rangers to keep Ryan McDonagh on the roster in order to fulfill the team’s potential. The 24-year-old first-pair defenseman appears on his way to restricted free agency and will thereby become eligible for an offer sheet when the market opens at noon Friday.
“There’s nothing new to report,” Ben Hankinson, McDonagh’s agent, told The Post via email. “We met at the draft but there’s still some work to be done before a deal is made.”
McDonagh is likely to sign a deal worth between $4.5 and $5 million for anywhere from three to five years, with the price escalating as does the term. If the defenseman goes to arbitration,— the player can file by July 10; if he does not, the club can file the following day — he would be liable for a two-year contract.
The offer-sheet business gets tricky. Though the Rangers have approximately $13.3 million of space with which to accommodate signing McDonagh and fellow Group II’s Derek Stepan, Carl Hagelin, Mats Zuccarello and recently acquired Justin Falk, that number swells to about $19.7 million with the 10 percent summer allowance.
So if a team were to come in with an offer sheet worth, say, $6.728 million per to McDonagh — which would equate to signing compensation of a first, a second and a third-round draft pick —, the Rangers would have the ability to match, though it would definitely cause some pain.
The chance of McDonagh getting an offer-sheet seems remote, but what if the Islanders, who have an immense amount of available cap space and need to use a fair amount of it in order to reach the floor, decide to make mischief?
The Blueshirts, in that case, probably wouldn’t be able to sign Zuccarello, whom they have slotted at somewhere around $1.25 million, and they would then have to play hardball with Stepan, who is not eligible for arbitration.
They would likely also have to waive both Darroll Powe and Arron Asham at the start of the year, cutting their combined $2.067 million cap hit to $217,000 as members of the AHL Wolf Pack.
Complicating the Rangers’ cap issue is the expectation that top-six wingers Ryan Callahan and Hagelin will miss the opening few weeks of the season while recovering from labrum surgery. The Blueshirts could get relief by placing either or both on long-term injury reserve at the start of the year, but doing so would make them ineligible for the first 10 games and 24 days of the schedule.
Wrapping up the “Goes Without Saying” Award for 2013, general manager Glen Sather said, “We think he’ll be much better next year,” in explaining the decision not to use an amnesty buyout on Brad Richards.