Report: NHL to Deny Rangers’ Request for Emergency Recall
The New York Rangers played shorthanded again on Wednesday with Ryan Lindgren not healthy enough to play, K’Andre Miller suspended, and Patrick Kane not ready to debut, and as such they seemingly met the requirements to utilize an emergency recall for today’s game vs. the Ottawa Senators. But according to Mollie Walker the Rangers will not be able to do so because they created the situation themselves.
Per source, NHL found that #NYR essentially created the emergency recall situation.
— Mollie Walker (@MollieeWalkerr) March 2, 2023
They were in a roster emergency with Lindgren injury & Miller suspension before acquiring Kane, but had accrued enough cap space at the time to address it by making regular recalls. (1/?)
Instead, Rangers chose to address roster emergency by adding Kane and as a result, used all their cap space.
— Mollie Walker (@MollieeWalkerr) March 2, 2023
Since they essentially put themselves in the man-short situation by adding Kane, league did not approve Rangers for the emergency recall.
The Rangers were in an emergency situation, and by going through the Kane traded added $2,625,000 to their books. From the league’s perspective, the Rangers could have added multiple players for that amount, so their situation isn’t truly an emergency.
Per Cap Friendly, the Rangers have an active roster size of 21 skaters, and $6,918 in cap space. This is seemingly uncharted territory, and the only potential way to work around this would be if someone were to go on LTIR. But that would mean the player in question would miss at least 10 games and 24 days of the season.
I don’t think the Rangers want to be without Lindgren or anyone else deemed eligible for that long, and if they were to add someone to replace him temporarily, they’d need to get under the cap again to be able to play Lindgren. I say anyone else deemed eligible because at this time of year a lot of players are playing with something bothering them unofficially, hence the nature of players having maintenance days excusing them from practice etc.
Putting Lindgren on LTIR to gain space only to use it on someone like Zac Jones who makes significantly less essentially defeats the benefit LTIR affords in the first place. This is certainly a fluid situation, and only reinforces the value of banking cap space throughout the season, something that could have been avoided by not having Libor Hajek among others remain on the roster as an extended healthy scratch for a good portion of the season.
the cool thing about being a sad, lonely cap nerd is sometimes... just sometimes... you can basically predict the future pic.twitter.com/MEG1OwB74Y
— HockeyStatMiner (@HockeyStatMiner) March 2, 2023
