GREENBURGH — The NHL trade deadline is Friday, but Rangers GM Chris Drury didn’t wait till the last minute.
The Rangers on Saturday traded pending unrestricted free agents defenseman Ryan Lindgren and winger Jimmy Vesey, along with unsigned prospect defenseman Hank Kampf, to the Colorado Avalanche for forward Juuso Parssinen, defenseman Calvin deHaan, and two conditional draft choices, a second-rounder and a fourth-rounder in this summer’s NHL draft. The Rangers are retaining 50% of Lindgren’s $4.5 million salary,
The second round pick is the better of Carolina’s or the Rangers’ own second-rounder (which had previously been traded to Arizona, and then subsequently traded to Colorado) and the fourth-rounder is the better of Colorado’s or Vancouver’s.
The move allowed the Rangers to get assets back for two players who would have been lost to free agency this summer. DeHaan, 33, is also a pending UFA who is making $800,000 this season. Parssinen, 24, will be a restricted free agent with arbitration rights. He currently makes $775,000.
The trade gives the Rangers eight picks in this summer’s draft. Before the deal, they didn’t have their own second-rounder, third-rounder or fourth-rounder, but they owned Seattle’s third-rounder from the Kaapo Kakko trade, and two fourth-rounders — one belonging to either Boston, Detroit or Anaheim, as a result of the Jacob Trouba trade to Anaheim, and one belonging to Dallas, from the Nils Lundkvist trade in 2022. Now they have a second and three fourths.
They now also have only one pending UFA (besides deHaan) on the roster in Reilly Smith. Drury will now presumably look to move Smith, who has 10 goals and 19 assists and a minus-1 plus/minus rating in 58 games, by the deadline.
Before the start of play on Saturday the Rangers werefour points out of wild card spot., They host Nashville at Madison Square Garden Sunday night. It’s close enough, with 23 games remaining in the season, that they could make up the necessary ground to make the playoffs, but it’s doubtful Drury — despite having plenty of space under the salary cap — will be looking to add pieces at the deadline to help them do so.
The Rangers, despite winning the Presidents’ Trophy for the best regular season record last season, have shown this season they are not a real Stanley Cup contender. And the shoulder injury suffered by Adam Fox in Tuesday’s game against the Islanders certainly doesn’t help.
, Drury has already done major work to reshape the roster in-season, having traded Trouba and Kakko in December and then making the big move to acquire J.T. Miller from Vancouver on Jan. 31 by trading Filip Chytil.
So it looks like the GM is in sell mode — not a complete teardown, but a minor retool. If there’s one more big move remaining, it could be moving on from Chris Kreider, the longest tenured Ranger. It’s been believed, ever since the report leaked out after Thanksgiving that Drury had sent out a memo to the other general managers that he was looking to make trades, and Trouba and Kreider were mentioned by name as being available, that the GM has been trying to trade Kreider.
The complication is that Kreider, whose 17 goals are tied with Vincent Trocheck for second-most on the team, has been bothered by a bad back all season and currently has missed the last three games. It is difficult to see how Drury would be able to convince teams not on Kreider’s 15-team no trade list to trade for him now.
DeHaan, a 6-1, 191-pounder who was a first round pick by the Islanders in 2009, likely will replace Lindgren in the lineup. He has no goals and seven assists in 44 games this season and 24 goals and 124 assists in 676 games in his career.
Parssinen, a 6-3, 212-pounder who was taken in the seventh round of the 2019 draft by Nashville, has four goals and seven assists in 37 games this season and 18 goals and 30 assists in 126 games in his career.
Lindgren, 26, was one of the first players acquired when the Rangers started their rebuild in February 2018 — he came over as an unsigned prospect from Boston in the trade that sent Rick Nash to the Bruins — had been a warrior for the Rangers in his seven seasons in the organization.
He played 387 games for the club, most of them as the steady partner for Fox, and scored 12 goals and 99 points overall, including two goals and 19 points in 54 games this season. He plays a physical game, dishing out and taking plenty of hits, and shed plenty of blood for the team, earning the fans’ love and the coaching staffs’ respect.
But he was injured in a preseason fight with the Islanders’ Scott Mayfield, and wasn’t having his finest season.
Vesey, 31, originally signed with the Rangers as a college free agent in 2016, coming off a Hobey Baker Award with Harvard as the best player in college hockey. After three seasons with the Rangers, he was traded to Buffalo, then bounced around to Toronto, Vancouver and New Jersey before returning to the Rangers in 2022, making the team as a professional tryout. He started the season injured and was in and out of the lineup, playing 33 games and scoring four goals with two assists.
Colin Stephenson covers the Rangers for Newsday. He has spent more than two decades covering the NHL and just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
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