Marc Staal scored the game-tying goal to send it to OT and ultimately a shootout the Rangers would win, Friday night against Ottawa. On his way to the net, Chris Neil (who, somewhat unrelatedly, is a total fuck) checked him and sent him toward the boards, which he hit at a funny angle. Staal did something unknown to his hip and is not skating at practice today. So, let's hope that's nothing serious.
In hilarious news, though, the next night, Derek Boogaard totally sack-tapped Neil with his stick. Check it out:
Awesome!
In significantly more serious news, Larry Brooks mentioned in the Post today that Prospal's knee injury may be worse than just the two-week "stay off it" that we thought it was. Brooks mentions that it might even involve a "surgery that would likely end his season, if not his career." You hate to see that - Prospal was great for us for the majority of last season, and I would have loved to see him return to form this year. However, as we also saw last season, he's not worth keeping around when his knee renders him ineffective. Here's hoping this injury is less serious than Brooks is implying here.
This also certainly changes the situation I mentioned last night, with respect to Drury and Prospal going on IR. If Prospal is really going to be out long-term, then that would take off his $2.48 million cap hit - sort of. Really, the way it works is that the cap hit still counts, but the team is afforded dispensation to bring up other players, so long as their total salaries (not cap hits) do not exceed the injured player's salary (not cap hit). These "replacement players" then do not count against the cap. So, basically, if Prospal were to spend the entire season on LTIR, his $1.4 million in conditional bonuses would not end up getting paid out, so there would be no harm in exceeding the cap by that amount into the bonus cushion, and his $1.08 million salary could be made up by players who would then not count against the cap (so, for example, we could call Erik Christensen his "replacement," and then Christensen's $925,000 would no longer count against the cap).
TL;DR for all that nonsense: if Prospal ends up on LTIR, we basically don't have to worry about his cap hit. This would mean we have the space to sign Fedotenko and still stay under the cap with the full roster we have now (assuming Drury is on regular IR to get our roster size down to 23). So, I guess while we wait to see what's happening with Prospal's knee, it makes sense to keep these guys around.
Today's forward lines at practice were exactly the ones I'd like to start with on Saturday night (assuming Drury and Prospal are still out):
Gaborik - Christensen - Frolov
Dubinsky - Anisimov - Callahan
Avery - Stepan - Fedotenko
Boogaard - Boyle - Prust
I can get behind that starting lineup. Let's go Rangers!
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