So, I had planned a big post talking about free agency and everyone's status and all that. I wrote about half of it, too. Then the Del Close Marathon happened, and now here we are, post-July 1.
The executive summary of the post-that-wasn't is "everyone's talking about Parise and Nash, let's clarify why those are totally different situations by talking about free agency." Parise is a free agent, which means he can sign with any team, now that July 1 has happened. Nash is under contract to the Blue Jackets, which means he'd have to be traded, which can happen any time (but probably, now that July 1 has happened, won't happen until after the big-name free agents get settled).
So, as for the Rangers, we can all just sit tight and wait for trades, in terms of the big names. The following players from last season remained under contract through at least 2012-13, and therefore are not going anywhere unless traded: Gaborik, Richards, Callahan, Dubinsky, Anisimov, Boyle, Rupp, Kreider, Stepan, Hagelin, Staal, Girardi, McDonagh, Sauer, and Lundqvist. (Not counting Mike Sauer, that's 10 forwards, 3 defensemen, and 1 goalie.) Zach Parise is not coming to New York (seriously, everyone), and the Rangers have no interest in Ryan Suter, which runs us out of all of the useful free agents.
The bad news, of course, is about losing all our mediocre depth, most prominently Brandon Prust, whose free agency took him to Montreal on a 4-year, $2.5 million/year deal. Understand: Glen Sather is right in asserting that Prust is not worth that deal. For perspective, Brian Boyle is currently costing $1.7m under the cap, and Dan Girardi $3.325m. Prust is not worth $2.5m. At the same time, team chemistry is something you need to consider with your 3rd- and 4th-line guys, just like with your backup netminder. While I ultimately agree with Sather's decision to walk, it does make the Rangers a worse team.
Of the remaining Ranger free agents: Stu Bickel re-upped with a 2-year deal at $750,000 per, and Marty Biron returns on a 2-year deal at $1.3m per. Both are great deals for all involved. Meanwhile, John Mitchell went to Colorado with a 2-year, $1.1m/year deal. If he was willing to take that contract, I think the Rangers should have offered it to him, but I like him more than most people do. Jeff Woywitka is returning to his first NHL team, the St. Louis Blues, for a 1-year, $950,000 deal. (Fine, whatever.) Also, John Scott, who played a gargantuan 33:19 for the Rangers, earning 1 shot and 5 penalty minutes for a -1 (totally worth that 5th-round pick, eh?) has gone off and signed with the Sabres for 1 year at $600,000. I don't miss him; I miss the 5th-round pick he used to be.
If he hasn't played in the league for long enough yet, a free agent is restricted - this means that if his old team makes him a good-enough offer (called a qualifying offer), then he's not allowed to sign with any other team (even if he doesn't accept the offer). The Rangers had 3 restricted free agents going into this off-season: Zuccarello, Del Zotto, and Stralman. They sent qualifying offers to all 3, though none have been accepted yet, and Zuccarello is off to the KHL anyway. The only free agents that leaves (from the big club roster) are Fedotenko and Eminger, who are not restricted and have not yet signed with the Rangers or anyone else.
Finally, the Rangers made a couple of additions since the start of free agency on Sunday: a pair of useless "tough guys" to supposedly "replace Prust," which they will not do because Prust's biggest values were on the penalty kill and in the locker room, not in his willingness to lose fights to men twice his size whenever his team asked him to. Micheal Haley comes to us from the always-classy New York Islanders, 2 years, $600,000 per. And, of course, because he has his fingers on the pulse of the fanbase, Slats signed, consummate douchebag Arron Asham to 2 years, $1 million per.
Ultimately, these cheap tough-guy signings are dumb. The Rangers need to get bigger by bringing in bigger, more powerful forwards - guys who play like Jagr, Ovechkin, and Nash - not by bringing in pugilists with hockey sticks that Torts will play 3 minutes a game. Also, Asham is a fuck-for-fuck who shouldn't play at all, and who is already 34. Remember the great Donald Brashear experiment? So do I.
Other than a few AHL moves (reupping Kris Newbury while letting Chad Johnson go to Phoenix and Jonathan Audy-Marchessault go to Columbus...), that's the free agency summary so far. Now we sit tight while Zach Parise and Ryan Suter figure out what to do. In the meanwhile, maybe we hear news about Stralman, Fedotenko, Eminger, or Del Zotto. Once Parise and Suter are settled, we open our ears for trades again, ideally for either Rick Nash or Bobby Ryan.
PS: We can get into salary cap stuff another time, but basically: the Rangers have plenty of room to work with this season - something like $18 million free under the cap with already 18 players under contract. The concern, however, is not backing themselves into a corner for future seasons. In either next off-season or the one after, the following contracts expire: Sauer, McDonagh, Hagelin, Stepan, Anisimov, Biron, Lundqvist, Bickel, Girardi, Kreider, Rupp, Boyle, Callahan, Gaborik.
Showing posts with label free agency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free agency. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
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.
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.
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