Following the buyout of Henrik Lundqvist, the Rangers will have just over $23 million in cap space.
Igor Shesterkin has one-year left on his entry level deal but Alex Georgiev is an RFA with arbitration rights.
Other RFAs include Ryan Strome, Brendan Lemieux, Phil Di Giuseppe and Tony DeAngelo.
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Jesper Fast, Greg McKegg and Micheal Haley are pending UFAs.
The NHL Draft begins on Tuesday night and continues on Wednesday.
Free Agency begins on July 9th.
Adam Rotter: The $3 million in cap space gained by buying out Lundqvist, or at least most of it, will go towards Georgiev’s new contract on, probably, a two-year deal. A two-year deal would leave him with one-year before being a UFA and, at that point, the Rangers would likely move him and find another backup for Shesterkin.
The Rangers have enough cap space to sign all of their RFAs for this season but the question now will become about how long those players are signed. With, discounting the players that already need new contracts, nearly everyone on the team but Jacob Trouba, Artemi Panarin, Chris Kreider and Alexis Lafreniere will need new deals in the next two-years. Not everyone will remain with the Rangers but they need to keep away space and flexibility for Mika Zibanejad to, likely, nearly double his current $5.35 million cap hit, new and maybe big deals for Chytil, Kakko, Fox and Lindgren and, arguably the biggest one, Igor Shesterkin. With a flat cap for the foreseeable future, the decisions the Rangers make regarding players like Strome and DeAngelo will have a big impact on how the Rangers proceed going forward.
There has been talk of Jack Eichel this week but the Sabres aren’t trading him. Even so, the price to acquire Eichel would be extreme and include a combo of all the players, prospects, assets you wouldn’t want to move (Kakko, Lafreniere, Fox, K’Andre Miller, etc). He’s the franchise player for the Sabres and they wouldn’t move him unless they were able to get multiple A/A+ pieces in return.
It’s very possible though that the actual next thing for the Rangers is announcing that Alexis Lafreniere is joining them.