It starts

Things are going to start happening sooner than you'd expect, in terms of next season. I don't know when news will break, and interesting things probably won't happen for some time, but it's important to have context when news does break. In the interest of keeping you informed, let's start with a rundown of our current roster and everyone's 2009-'10 status.

Under contract (numbers listed are cap hit, not salary)
Scott Gomez - $7.4 million
Chris Drury - $7.1 million
Sean Avery - $1.9 million
Aaron Voros - $1 million
Wade Redden - $6.5 million
Michal Rozsival - $5 million
Dan Girardi - $1.6 million
Marc Staal - $0.8 million
Henrik Lundqvist - $6.9 million

Restricted free agents (* means eligible for arbitration)
Nikolai Zherdev *
Lauri Korpikoski
Fredrik Sjostrom *
Brandon Dubinsky
Ryan Callahan *

Unrestricted free agents
Nik Antropov
Blair Betts
Colton Orr
Derek Morris
Paul Mara
Stephen Valiquette

Let's make sure we understand what this means. First of all, the salary cap. It's important to understand that there are like a million games that can be played with the salary cap, and at the end of the day, the cap hit incurred for a given player is, at best, a pretty good approximation of how much you're paying him for the year. These games include bonuses, contracts to other teams, and all sorts of crazy magic that is probably fascinating to many businesspeople. Hell, it would probably even be fascinating to me, if someone sat me down and explained it all - math is fucking neat. But, for now, don't worry too much about it - the important thing about a player is his cap hit.

A salary cap, obviously, is the maximum salary a team can spend on its players, total, for the season (again, tabulating their magical "cap hit" number, rather than their actual salary). Actually, what we call the salary cap the NHL calls the "Upper Limit of the Payroll Range" - the implication being that there is a corresponding "Lower Limit of the Payroll Range," which is a thing the Rangers ought never to have to worry about. For reference, the Lower Limit is defined to be $16 million under the Upper Limit.

For the 2008-'09 season, the salary cap was $56.7 million. Generally speaking, the cap rises annually, by an astronomically larger-than-inflation holy-crap-athletes-make-a-lot-of-money quantity. Bear in mind, of course, that over the last few years, the Canadian Dollar has risen dramatically compared to our Piece of Shit Dollar, which makes these numbers a little more believable. But still: the first season after the lockout (which you'll recall was '05-'06), the league salary cap was $39 million. Yeah, the Upper Limit. Since then, it rose to $44 million, $50.3 million, and then its current $56.7 million. Wow. So, some people are talking about the cap rising by that much again, and looking at $62 million.

However, you may also have noticed that this country is in a shit-ass recession right now. Many other internet hockey scholars would have you believe, therefore, that the cap will fall to as low as $50 million, or even back down into the 40s (alack!). However, internet scholars are always wrong. Conventional wisdom, if there can be said to be such a thing, probably convinces us that the cap will stay right around where it is. TSN reports that the Globe and Mail reports that it may fall a little, down to around $55 million, but not more than that. Note: the aforelinked article is not just a report of the cap fall, it also bitches about how NHL players will lose way more money than it sounds like, due to money held in escrow. The time it took you to read that sentence is way longer than the time you should spend feeling bad for NHL players losing money in the recession.

So, I'm going to assume that we're looking at around $55 million for the salary cap next season, until I hear otherwise. With that figure in mind, let's look back up at our current contracts. We're incurring a $38.2 million cap hit for the players we have under contract, leaving us something like $17 million to sign the rest. This is not great (though it's much better than it would have been with Naslund still in the mix). We can trade some of the current players under contract for others, and we can sign any of our free agents, listed above.

More terminology: an unrestricted free agent (UFA) is the simplest thing a player can be: his contract expires, and he is looking for a new one. This is essentially what you and I are. We are UFAs, in that any NHL team can attempt to sign a contract with us, should we and the team be interested. These players are free to deal with the Rangers, if interested, as well as with anyone else.

A restricted free agent (RFA) cannot just leave the Rangers quite as easily. Before other teams are allowed to negotiate with RFAs, the RFA's current team is allowed to make an offer that takes priority, in which case the RFA is committed to take the offer from the current team. There are certain rules about these offers - they must be for 100%-110% of the player's previous salary, depending on what that salary was - but the point is that another team can't just come in and buy him up unless his team lets him go. So, these are players for whom the Rangers won't have to negotiate with other teams (which ultimately drives salaries up).

RFAs are also what make July 1 an important date in the NHL calendar. (See? The Cup is handed out mid-June - there really is hockey news year-round!) July 1 is when free agency signing begins. This means that every RFA in the league becomes unrestricted. So, if teams want to make moves for their RFAs, they have to do it by July 1, or any prior claim they have is waived.

One more thing: that asterisk up with the RFAs that talks about arbitration. This isn't a huge deal, I just wanted to make you aware of it. Presumably, an RFA could be worth way more than his current contract. A team could then get away with continuing to underpay him by exercising their rights to retain their RFAs. This is where arbitration comes in - certain players, depending on their tenure in the league, qualify for salary arbitration, which is exactly what it sounds like. The team and the player each propose a salary, and a third party arbitrates and comes up with the right number, by magic. The only reason we care is that those RFAs that do qualify for arbitration this summer, if they choose to exercise their rights to arbitration, may end up costing us more than they otherwise would as regular, rights-less RFAs.

I think that's the summary. Comment if you have any questions.