On the day the Kings traipsed the Stanley Cup around Los Angeles for their championship parade, Brad Richards went to the Rangers practice facility and was the first player to meet his coach for an exit interview.
The Blueshirts and Richards are in the midst of what is very likely is the middle stages of a divorce, one now strangely messy, considering how much he contributed to his team off the ice — and how little he contributed on it, especially in the five-game loss to the Kings in the Stanley Cup finals.
Yet Richards’ annual $6.67 million salary-cap hit through 2019-20 — and the subsequent cap-recapture charges the team would endure if he retired early — would horribly handcuff the team financially, and makes the 34-year-old forward the most likely target for the team’s final amnesty buyout, thus wiping his cap hit from the books.
“It’s still painful to lose in the Stanley Cup final,” coach Alain Vigneault said on Monday, just three days removed from a 3-2 double-overtime defeat to the Kings in L.A. that ended the season.
“But Brad is an experienced guy that knows that we’ve got some decisions to make. They’re not easy. We’re looking at different things, and he’s going to be a pro and he’s going to wait until we make up our mind.”
Soon after March 5, Richards was hardly spoken or written about without his name being modified by the moniker of “de facto captain,” a role he embraced in the wake of the trade that sent the actual captain, Ryan Callahan, as part of a package to the Lightning in exchange for Martin St. Louis. After both wins and losses, in both the regular season and postseason, Richards was upright in speaking to the media, always forthright and honest and at times even cutting in his self-assessment.
Yet on Monday in Greenburgh, Richards was mysteriously absent, gone from the building before the media even showed up. Whether intentional or not, that left Vigneault and his teammates to do the speaking for him.
“I think if you look at Brad’s overall season, he had a real good year,” said Vigneault, who demoted Richards to the fourth line for most of Games 4 and 5 in the Cup finals after he was third on the team with 51 points in the regular season. “In the final series, I don’t know if it was a combination of some other guys playing a little bit better than he was, but we had some decisions to make in Game 4 and Game 5.
“But his overall play five-on-five and on the power play during the year was very good. I’m very happy what he brought to the table — a veteran player from Day One was a real good extension of the coaching staff in that dressing room. So, I think he should walk away from this season very pleased with how he played and how he contributed to our team.”
And yet Vigneault couldn’t avoid the obvious.
“As everybody knows, there’s decisions to be made,” he said, “and we haven’t made those yet, so we’re going to talk and figure it out.”
As Richards took over the reins as leader for the most successful Rangers team in two decades, his teammates in the room could do nothing but laud his effort.
“He’s been a big part of this team,” franchise bedrock Henrik Lundqvist said. “I honestly haven’t thought about it, so we’ll discuss it when we know.”
Added restricted free-agent center Derick Brassard: “He brought that leadership … In this dressing room, we all hope he’s going to be back. When Cally left, Richie really stepped up.”
Vigneault was planning on spending Monday and Tuesday in meetings with the franchise brain trust, headed by general manager Glen Sather and in concert with the scouting department, led by director of player personnel Gordie Clark. In those meetings, Vigneault said they were “going through the process of evaluating our team,” and that must first and foremost include Richards.
Although the coach certainly remembers Richards fondly, saying, “I’m a big fan of Brad Richards … He’s a classy, classy individual,” it’s clear the plan for the team moving forward is dependent on the decision of what to do with that one player.
And no matter how hard that might be to make, it’s a decision that at this point seems inevitable.
“Everyone knows we have quite a few decisions to make,” Vigneault said. “We’ll see what happens.”