Over the coming months, I will be blogging occasionally, though less often, as news of the Rangers' future comes out. I understand that I'm way behind on this, and I'll be catching up first. Expect news of many young kids to appear here soon. But for now, we bid a (few days late) fond farewell to a classy gentleman named Markus Naslund.
Now, I know I've been up and down on the man throughout this season, but please notice that that's not the same thing as being down on him the whole time. I was up and down on almost everyone this season - we were an up and down team. But who was Naslund to us, overall?
You know how, at the end of the year, the coaches would talk about how there are some kind of people who thrive on the playoff style of pressure, and there are some people who shy away from it? They also talked about the people whose hearts are in it, but whose bodies just aren't giving them what they want. Naslund was absolutely the leader of this squad. Unlike some other Ranger underperformers, I have every reason to believe that Naslund really was just unable to keep it up. Let's look at the numbers.
Naslund is 35 years old and came to us after being a Canuck from 1995-2008 (so, no, he wasn't around for "this one will last a lifetime). This season with the Rangers was his 15th in the NHL, rounding out a career in which he scored 395 goals and 474 assists in over 1000 games. Ranger fans, who are (understandably) used to the idea of brining in vets past their prime and watching them underperform, were largely frustrated by the fact that he didn't, as he did for the '02-'03 Canucks, put up over 100 points for us on the season.
But let's put that in perspective. He's 3 years older than our captain and timid leader, the next oldest player on a team whose average age is now approximately 26 (I was very lazy in calculating this. I found the average birth year of everyone on the roster page on the Rangers website, and came up with "It's probably around 26 or 27." Forgive me. I'm pretty close). Unlike any other debatable underperformers, he's the one whose age might actually give him half an excuse.
And yet. Naslund was fifth on the team this season with 46 points (number 1 was Nik Antropov with 59; 46 of them were for the Leafs). He was seventh on the team with 22 assists, one assist behind sixth (#4 was Antropov, who got 25 of his 31 with Toronto). Hell, he was second on the team in goals, with 24, 4 behind team leader Antropov (who, yes, got most of them with Toronto (21)). So. There's your underachiever.
Naslund, in his move to New York, went from the same team he had played on since 1995, a team he captained for seven years, under the same coach for nine. He moved over to the Eastern Conference, under a Western Conference-ish coach, to a team full of question marks that had just lost their very-Eastern-Conference leader. Then, a few months later, that team fired its coach and replaced him with some angry guy who won a cup in Tampa. Do you see the point? Frustrated New Yorkers were not a fucking easy time for a guy who was treated like royalty in Vancouver. And you gotta respect what he did manage to do in his time here.
But there's more to this story, and this is the part I want you to understand. It is a very big deal to the New York Rangers that Markus Naslund retired. Sure, he did a good job for us, but it's no secret that he was a little past his prime to be all that effective - especially in Torts's system that relies on the in-your-face, safe-is-death hockey of Ryan Callahan, Brandon Dubinsky, and Sean Avery. He knew he wasn't gonna cut it for an entire season in 2009-2010. And this is where the class comes in.
First of all, please remember our salary cap woes. Before Naslund retired, we had about $42 million committed to ten players, in a season whose cap is expected to be somewhere in the $57 million region.
Okay, so: Naslund was signed, last summer, to a 2-year, $8 million deal. Obviously, one year remained. Money-wise, there was $3 million left in that contract that we owed him, and given the nature of the contract, it was worth $4 million under the cap (don't worry too much about this - games can be played with salary caps, to shift money around, and a million of next season's cap would come from what we paid him last season). Part of this deal was a no-move clause. These are somewhat standard among high end players - it basically guarantees Naslund a roster spot on the Rangers unless he chooses to waive it. This doesn't mean he has to play every night, but it means he has to stay a New York Ranger - he can't be traded or assigned to the Wolf Pack - unless he approves it.
This means that the Rangers were basically screwed into keeping Naslund as a high-usage winger for $4 million. Trading him, which would have pended his approval anyway, would not have gone well, and would have left us paying part of his salary. We couldn't just reassign him to the minors. So, we were more or less stuck. You can see why this wasn't great. Especially given our cap woes, though not the biggest offender in this category, he was in the way of development.
You might be thinking "but, favorite blogger ever, teams and players in these kinds of contracts must get tired of each other all the time! What happens then?" Good question! You're right: this does happen all the time. If a team and a player sign a contract, and someone wants out, the player doesn't always end up begrudgingly on a team that doesn't want him for a year. Usually, what happens is a buyout. A buyout is when a team decides to eat the money and pay off the rest of a player's contract, thus buying him out of their obligation to him.
However, a buyout is also subject to certain NHL regulations. A buyout would still count against the cap, but it is split up. A buyout must be a certain percentage of the value of the contract, according to the age of a player. And, a team only has the authority to buy a player out of his contract during the official off-season NHL buyout period.
So, let's review: If the Rangers wanted to buy out Naslund (which we certainly would have), we would have had to pay him $2 million (the league-mandated 2/3 of the remaining contract value for anyone over 25). This $2 million would count under this year's cap, while the remaining million would end up under the 2010-2011 cap. They would have had to do this in the official buyout period: between June 15 and June 30 (reasonably being the time between handing out the cap and the start of free agency signing).
Let's recap the review: knowing, as all involved knew, that he was not going to be able to reasonably fit into the system next season, Naslund could have done absolutely nothing and been handed $2 million by the New York Rangers in a little over a month, then gone on his merry way out of the NHL (into retirement, probably in Vancouver, where he likely never has to pay for a drink). Instead, he retired this week. Before June 15. He left the NHL, because he would rather have done that than be the next Brett Favre. He came to New York to try to give his floundering career a jolt, and it turned out it really was his time. So he left. One fewer season would have been too soon. One more would have been too many. Classy.
Among the things he left behind: his contract with the New York Rangers. His $3 million to play, or his free $2 million to not play. A $2 million to $4 million cap hit for us. Thanks to his retirement, we're down to looking at only a $37.9 million commitment on next season thus far. Granted, that's not fantastic for 9 players of whom a handful are mediocre, but it's significantly more breathing room than we had a week ago. Much respect for Markus Naslund. Thanks, farewell, and all the best.
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