BYE-BYE, BUCH' Trade painful, but necessary
Drury's renovation continues as Rangers deal forward to St. Louis
Rangers general manager Chris Drury’s remodeling of the team continued Friday, when he dealt five-year lineup staple Pavel Buchnevich to the Blues in exchange for 25-year-old Sammy Blais and a 2022 second-round pick.
The move came a day after the Blueshirts locked up bottom-six grinder Barclay Goodrow with a six-year, $21.85 million contract, and a week after trading Brett Howden to the Golden Knights. And with the start of free agency on Wednesday, the Rangers may have more renovations in store.
Trading Buchnevich was necessary for the Rangers financially, because key players such as goalie Igor Shesterkin, Norris Trophy-winner Adam Fox and top-line center Mika Zibanejad are due for substantial raises over the next two seasons. The Rangers may have an abundance of cap space this offseason, but it is expected to dissipate quickly.
Buchnevich, a restricted free agent with arbitration rights, was searching for a long-term deal, which the Rangers simply wouldn’t have been able to afford.
By shipping Buchnevich to St. Louis, Drury also freed up playing time and a spot in the top six for younger players such as Kaapo Kakko or Vitaly Kravtsov. One of the Rangers’ most pressing lineup obstacles last season was having top-six caliber wingers buried in the bottom six. Buchnevich’s departure creates a vacancy that the Rangers can likely fill internally.
“There’s only so much cap space to go around and there’s only so much ice time to go around,” Drury said Friday night. “I feel really good about our depth at winger.”
After being drafted in the third round (75th overall) by the Rangers in 2013, Buchnevich posted 79 goals and 116 assists in 301 games over five seasons, and had a career-high 48 points (20 goals, 28 assists) in 54 games last season.
Dealing a restricted free agent (RFA) with arbitration rights who is set to reach unrestricted status next summer is a tough sell for a general manager under any conditions, let alone in a flat-salary cap world.
But it appears the return of a 2022 second-rounder and Blais, a north-south physical winger, is what Drury was looking for. The Rangers also now have eight picks in the 2022 entry draft, including three picks in the first two rounds and six in the first four.
Blais comes with a cap hit of a mere $1.5 million, which is much cheaper than what Buchnevich will get, and will become an arbitration eligible RFA next summer. At 6-foot-2 and 205 pounds, Blais is a big-bodied competitor, the type of player with which the Rangers want to stock their roster. Like Goodrow, Blais is a defensive forward who can bolster the bottom six with more grit and tenacity.
“I think [Blais] brings a lot of size, a good physical edge, I think he has some offensive upside,” Drury said. “The minutes he’s played in the past, he’s had good production.”
The Quebec native, who was drafted by St. Louis in the sixth round in 2014, will also bring playoff experience after winning the Stanley Cup with the Blues in 2019. Blais has competed in the playoffs in three of his four NHL seasons, posting a combined three goals and five assists in 27 postseason games.
In 36 games last season, Blais had eight goals and seven assists. He has 35 points (17 goals, 18 assists) over 119 career NHL games.
Despite heightened anticipation, the Rangers didn’t make a splash with their 16th-overall pick in the 2021 Entry Draft on Friday night. Instead, they used it to select forward Brennan Othmann.
“We had kind of narrowed it down to three or four players at that pick and you’re crossing your fingers as it goes on,” Drury said. “We were excited [Othmann] was there. Our scouts kind of describe him as a Swiss army knife kind of player.”
Drury said he spoke with a lot of different teams and mulled a lot of different possibilities, but ultimately didn’t come close to packaging the Rangers’ firstround pick in a trade deal.
RIGHT off the top, let’s stipulate that the optics of trading your first-line right winger for a bottom-six guy and a second-round draft pick is not going to make for an easy sell. It’s just not, regardless of the mitigating factors surrounding it.
So the Rangers’ Chris Drury will take heat for his first playerfor-player trade as an NHL general manager, in which he sent Pavel Buchnevich to the Blues for Sammy Blais and a 2022 second-round pick on Friday in the hours before the opening round of the draft. There is no question about that.
It is fair to say that Buchnevich last season became the player the Rangers had been waiting for since he first arrived in New York in September 2016. He played with grit, was diligent without the puck, developed into a superior penalty killer and for the most part lost the not-at-all charming woe-is-me body language that had become a trademark his younger years.
But just when No. 89 was about to say hello to fame and fortune, it became time to say good-bye, and through no fault of his own. Arbitration eligible and one year away from unrestricted free agency, Buchnevich was (and is) likely to command between $5.5 million and $6.5 million per on his next multiyear deal. Facing an onrushing cap crisis two years down the road, the Rangers could not accommodate that kind of number.
But perhaps equally important in the equation is that the Rangers were simply too unbalanced, too homogeneous, too top-heavy without the necessary bottomsix ingredients to win battles, to grind down the opposition, to emerge with two points when the top six was smothered. The previous regime collected a collection of talents. Yes, of course there is a place for that.
But there is no place for, say, nine similar talents who can’t assume traditional third- and fourth-line roles. This was not former coach David Quinn’s fault, but there were almost always guys out of place in the lineup because there was no defined spot for them. There was no real distinction between the second line’s duties and the third line’s responsibilities. The fourth line was essentially a repository for leftovers or guys being taught lessons.
That is going to change. It won’t be that way under this administration
or under incoming head coach Gerard Gallant. The Rangers will have enough firepower up front and on the power play, but they will also present a formidable bottom six who strap on their hardhats, go to work and provide a different dimension. They will be tougher to play against. At least that’s the plan.
That is the genesis of the acquisition and long-term signing of Barclay Goodrow. That is the genesis of this deal for Blais, a 6-foot-2, 205-pound, 25-year-old who plays a grinding, physical,
north-south game, will drop the gloves when the time is right, and can make a play or two. He recorded 28 points (14-14) in 76 games over the past two seasons while getting an average of 12:20 of ice time a night playing a fair amount on a line with Ryan O’Reilly. Among players with 70 or more games the last two years, Blais is fourth in hits per 60 minutes.
And Blais, just like Goodrow, has a ring, though Goodrow, the former Lightning winger, surely
played a larger role in Tampa Bay’s repeat 2020 and 2021 titles than Blais did for the 2019 Blues. Still, there now is Stanley Cup pedigree in the room that had been missing. That item on the résumé is important to Drury.
Exchanging Buchnevich for Blais opens a top-six spot on the
right side. As I suggested in this space Friday, the construction of the third line as a checking unit means that the Blueshirts won’t stack Artemi Panarin, Chris Kreider and Alexis Lafreniere on the left. So one, most likely Lafreniere, will move to the right to fill the vacancy created by Buchnevich’s exit.
There is still much work to be done. The Jack Eichel Saga hangs over the offseason. So does the organizational deficit down the middle that was not addressed in Round One of the draft, when the Rangers tapped winger Brennan Othmann as the 16th selection, rather than a pair of highly regarded centers on the board.
The Rangers still must add Black-and-Blueshirts to the bottom-six mix. And there is a need for a left defenseman with size and a physical presence. There is ample cap space with which to address those areas with the freeagent market opening Wednesday. I wonder, does Zdeno Chara still fit the profile?
The Buchnevich deal is worthy of debate. The Rangers appear to have given a lot more than they received. That means they are blessed, correct? The return may seem light, but this was a targeted acquisition. The necessary transformation is under way. That’s not an optic. That’s reality.