#NYR will have every opportunity to improve this summer. They have the cap room to do whatever they want. They could parlay their sound expansion draft status to maybe even get a LD @ a friendly rate. They may have 'rebuild's over!' license for a blockbuster trade. Anything goes.
Until then: they're a cap-crunched, injury-battered team. Between Mika (missing training camp... lingering covid effects??) & Chytil (injury) they're starving up the middle. They have a ghost of a 3rd D pair, even when full healthy. They're the youngest team in the NHL by a mile.
I've said it before but I think the next 18 months have all the potential in the world to be as day-and-night a transition as the 2010-11 & 2011-12 NYR seasons were.
Even semi-competently working around the emerging bright spots is a helluva runway for takeoff.
Until then... 🍻
What Miller is showing us (and what Fox has continued to show us) is x1000 more important to me than the 2021 division standings. I'll put it to you that way.
Just for context: imagine Rangers give Buchnevich, Chytil, Lindgren, & Shesterkin the biggest (most expensive) extensions plausible this summer.
Rangers would still be ~$10m under the salary cap with ~20 roster spots all sewn up.
Honestly anything goes this summer.
Rangers didn't have much goin on other than Stepan in 2010-11.
NY got Richards in free agency and got Brassard by trading off their surplus winger depth for value 🤔
But to your point having one of the worst 3rd D pairs in the NHL is a big problem, too.
I am all for cutting youngsters some slack... and I'm all for reigning in relativity for #NYR having a center crisis on their hands [with the Chytil injury...]
but Brett Howden has 0 goals, as a center, in #NYR's last 21 games despite nearly 5 hours(!) of total icetime.