One year and two days ago, the Rangers signed blue-chip free-agent centers Scott Gomez and Chris Drury to long-term contracts worth more than $7 million per year.
Yesterday, the Rangers essentially turned the team over to them and to Henrik Lundqvist on a day two of this free-agent season in which much of the recent past was left behind, even if not necessarily by design.
The Rangers wanted Mats Sundin. He put them and everyone else on hold. They wanted to keep Jaromir Jagr on their one-year term. That never became a realistic possibility. They wanted Marian Hossa, and believed they had an outstanding chance of bagging the market’s featured winger, but the Pittsburgh rental elected instead to take a one-year contract from the Red Wings.
They wanted to keep Sean Avery, but not really, and yesterday morning declined the opportunity to match the four-year, $15.5M contract he signed with Dallas. Given that the contract includes a no-move clause, it ultimately became the right thing to do.
And so, with options on the market all but exhausted and the team lining up as the ultimate in helicopter squads (no wings), the Rangers instead pulled off a trade with Columbus, acquiring the very talented but equally erratic and thus far underachieving 23-year-old right winger Nikolai Zherdev (and throw-in pivot Dan Fritsche) for Fedor Tyutin – a third-pair D following the addition of Wade Redden – and Christian Backman.
“It’s going to be on Chris and me now, and that’s what we wanted when we came to New York,” Gomez said by phone yesterday from his home in Alaska. “If I’m playing with Zherdev, it’s going to be up to me to see that it works, and I’m up for it.
“We’re going to go be an in-your-face team that moves and pressures the puck. I’ve been talking to Chris and he feels exactly the same way I do.
“We’re ready for the responsibility.”
Zherdev, selected fourth overall by the Blue Jackets in the 2003 Entry Draft, recorded 61 points (25-36) last season. He has immense ability. There are, however, overriding questions about both his work ethic and ability to get along in the room.
It’s asking a great deal of the Rangers to incorporate a project whose success will be critical to the team, and asking even more of Gomez and Drury to assume the role of guidance counselors.
Did anyone say, Brendan Shanahan?
Not yet, though neither the team nor Shanahan has excluded the possibility of a reprise. With Zherdev accounting for merely a $2.5M hit and Fritsche on a $787,500 qualifier – Tyutin was at $2.875M and Backman at $2.3M – the Blueshirts have scads of cap space.
The Blueshirts not only are still shy a top-line winger – there are ongoing discussions with the faded Markus Naslund, who is also being sought by the decimated Penguins – but the current construction places an enormous burden on Ryan Callahan, Lauri Korpikoski, Nigel Dawes, Petr Prucha and Artem Anisimov to produce beyond their experience.
The trade of Tyutin leaves the team seeking another defenseman after unaccountably allowing free agent Brooks Orpik to slip through their hands.
Orpik, who would have been a perfect fit, re-signed with the Penguins yesterday after talks with the Blueshirts somehow evaporated.
Dimitri Kalinin, the Buffalo free agent, is among those on the radar screen.