Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Zipay's Offseason Game Plan

Steve Zipay at Blue Notes gives his five things that must be addressed this offseason including clearing cap space, fixing the power play, who to keep & who to dump, finding scoring and whether John Tortorella will be around for the entire season next year...

Here's Zipay on the most important thing, cap space...

"This will be one of the trickiest offseasons leaguewide, with 40 percent of players either restricted or unrestricted free agents and the salary cap expected to go down in 2010-11, which will affect long-term contracts. So this is easier said than done. But before any missing pieces can be added, the brass and coach John Tortorella need to create some room. About $41 million of the $56.9- million cap is committed to nine players (Henrik Lundqvist, Scott Gomez, Chris Drury, Wade Redden. Michal Rozsival, Markus Naslund, Sean Avery, Marc Staal and Dan Girardi). One or two for them could be asked to waive a no-trade clause and be sent elsewhere or bought out, with the latter spreading the future cap hit over a number of years. A buyout isn't unprecedented: Think Knicks or Bobby Holik in 2005, who had two years remaining on his contract."

...Sather is going to have to get real creative this offseason if he wants to re-sign our important players (Dubinsky & Callahan) as well as bringing in a much needed sniper.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sather has his work cut out for him, no doubt. Cally and Dubi should be resigned first, then we obviously need a scorer as well. Chack out my post looking at the offseason ahead at http://rangerstribune.com.