2019-2020 NHL season thread

It's a good trade. For both teams. Skjei is skilled. He skates really well. My impressions, having watched him for 4+ seasons: His rookie year he was soooo damned good. Which is the only reason he leaves NY as a disappointment. It's not that he has been horrible, it's just been a really inconsistent ride and he hasn't taken the next step everyone figured was coming. Some games he is really bad in the defensive end, which is frustrating because he's a big guy. But he plays passively. I get the sense some opponents see him as soft and try to push him around. At his best, though, he has size and really good skating ability, and he protects the puck really well when he is lugging it out of his own zone. Offensively, he has good vision and he is a very good passer.

The Rangers have more than a $6 million cap hit next year from the Shattenkirk buyout. Kreider got his raise. And they have Ryan Strome, Tony D'Angelo, Alex Georgiev, Jesper Fast and Brendan Lemeiux with expiring contracts and set to get raises. They needed to make choices and I think this was a really good choice to address things. Good on Carolina for taking advantage of it. On the left side defensively, the Rangers have two good prospects in the AHL, Libor Hayek and Yegor Rykov, and they have a first round pick playing college @ Wisconsin named K'Andre Miller who should be ready next year. They were not going to be able to replace Chris Kreider and their top 6 is actually really good now. But with the pipeline they have in place, they can replace Skjei. They are still going to have to make choices regarding the guys they will need to resign. I get that they didn't want to totally rip the team apart since they are playing so well and have somehow put themselves into the playoff picture, but if there was a deal for Ryan Strome, I think it would have been a classic case of selling high. He has totally revitalized his career in NY, and I like him. ... he plays hard every night. But he is a very good player, not a great player, he has just looked like all world because Artemi Panarin is ridiculous. Whoever they put out there with him looks amazing. Jesper Fast moved up to that line recently, and he's been scoring goals at a clip he doesn't.

In any case, there are all kinds of things the Rangers can potentially do now. Maybe there will be more of a market for Georgiev around the draft than there is now. Same for Tony D'Angelo, although he has been so good this year that I suspect they will make him the priority resignining. If they can convince Lundqvist to retire, that would clear up $8.5 million of cap space and they are OK. Or if they can get him to accept a trade with them eating a portion of the cap hit, it would help. It's a shitty situation, as a fan you want better for him, but Igor Shestorkin is their future. ... their present actually, except he got into a car accident Sunday and is going to be out for a while, which temporarily solves the goalie mess.

It's fun to be a Rangers fan right now. They have played amazingly the last few months, and they didn't rip apart the team again and are going to let their young guys experience some meaningful games for a playoff push. It should be fun.

 

It gave me some insight into what we are dealing with in the front office. Jeff Gorton has been pretty clinical and a little cold blooded the last few years, and seeing guys like Stepan, JT Miller, McDonagh, Kevin Hayes, Zuccarello, etc. get sold off one by one has been tough. Before this season, though, John Davidson took over as team president and they made a splash with Panarin and Trouba. I was really interested to see which way they would go this year. On the one hand, they are not going to win shit as they are constituted. On the other hand, they are clearly moving in the right direction and you don't want to turn into the Buffalo Sabres doing a perpetual rebuild. They seemed to understand that the fans can only be so patient. At some point, the draft picks and prospects aren't as meaningful as just going for it with what you have built.

I think Kreider was the right guy to commit to -- and I say that prepared for them to regret the last 2 or 3 years of that contract. I also wonder if they botched it by holding off as long as they did to even engage him. It worked out, thankfully. When reports yesterday were that they were too far apart and he was likely to be traded, I was thinking that Kreider wanted to stay, the team wanted him, so why weren't the compromising? It was encouraging that they did.