Center sent to Senators
In the Rangers’ quest to get younger, faster, and open up some salary-cap space, Derick Brassard became the first casualty.
In a rare July trade completed Monday, the Rangers traded Brassard and a 2018 seventh-round pick to the Ottawa Senators in exchange for Mika Zibanejad and a 2018 second-round pick.
The swap of centers jettisons the 28-year-old Brassard back near his hometown of Hull, Quebec — just over the river from Ottawa — while the 23-year-old Zibanejad will be inserted into a lineup that general manager Jeff Gorton has focused on getting younger. Zibanejad carries a $2.625 million hit this coming season, and then will become an arbitration-eligible restricted free agent.
But if this is the continuation of a larger roster overhaul still to happen, than Gorton was downplaying it.
“I know there is a lot of perception that you have to overhaul the team and do all these things, but I’m not sure how realistic that is,” Gorton said on a conference call, his team having been bounced out of the playoffs in the first round this past spring after making three of the previous four conference finals.
“We look at each deal differently and see where it takes us. I would say I’m not sitting here and mandated to change 10 things. This is an opportunity to get better and that’s why we took it.”
The question of whether that new cap space was already set aside for another move that might be close to happening was one Gorton deflected.
“If I had another move, I wouldn’t tell you,” he kidded. “The ability to get [Zibanejad], to get a younger player, to get a guy that’s fast, big, plays real well in his own zone, can do a lot of things for us — that’s the exciting piece. The fact that we have salary-cap space is good. We’ll look at everything now.”
At 6-foot-2, 211 pounds, Zibanejad is coming off a career season, scoring 21 goals to go with 51 points in 81 games for the lowly Senators, who drafted him with the No. 6 overall pick in 2011. It was the second straight 20-goal season for the native of Stockholm, Sweden, to go along with a drastic improvement at the faceoff dot, winning 50.46 percent of his draws.
For a Rangers team that finished the regular season ranked 26th in the league in penalty killing, Zibanejad will join a shorthanded forwards group that has seen the offseason additions of Michael Grabner, Nathan Gerbe and Josh Jooris.
“There is no secret our penalty killing was not good,” Gorton said. “Some of the moves we made, if not all of them, have had some part in that.”