Rangers nearing Pirri deal

One of the tenets of general managers is that a team can never have enough depth. Well, Rangers GM Jeff Gorton is certainly taking that one to heart.

Gorton was close Thursday to completing a contract for yet another free-agent forward, 25-year-old Brandon Pirri, for a reported oneyear, $1.1 million deal. It is a low-risk, middling-reward contract, as it’s not exactly clear where Pirri might fit in the current group of 15 forwards.

Pirri has dealt with a couple of injuries in his career and was traded from the Panthers to the Ducks last season, finishing his 61 games with 14 goals and 31 points. He was also traded in the middle of 2013-14 from the Blackhawks — who drafted him in the second round (No. 59 overall) in 2009 — to the Panthers, with whom he had his best year: 22 goals in 49 games in 2014-15.

But Pirri’s addition hardly means a trade is imminent. At this point in the summer, the market has barely changed from where it was a few weeks ago. So, no, Rick Nash and his $7.8 million annual cap hit haven’t been flipped yet — and he likely won’t be before the Blueshirts show up to training camp in about a month.

But that doesn’t mean Gorton is done reconfiguring his team on the fly. He already won the lottery when top college free-agent forward Jimmy Vesey decided to pick Broadway for his new home, having signed a max entrylevel deal out of Harvard late last week. With the midsummer trade of last season’s top points producer Derick Brassard to the Senators in a deal that brought back younger, faster — and cheaper — pivot Mika Zibanejad, the Rangers already look distinctly different up front than the team that was bounced in the first round of last postseason by the eventual Stanley Cup-champion Penguins.

There are still questions on the aging back end, and how to deal with that is made more complicated by most of the best players going to the World Cup of Hockey, taking place for two weeks in Toronto in mid-September, as well as the looming expansion draft next summer.