Michael Del Zotto’s game was going south. Now, that’s where the 23-year-old defenseman is taking it — south to Nashville following a one-for-one deal on Wednesday in which the Rangers acquired 29-year-old Predators defenseman Kevin Klein.
Klein isn’t going to knock anyone’s socks off. He’s a reasonably dependable, albeit vanilla, six-year veteran who has 82 career points (16 goals, 66 assists) and 110 penalty minutes in 403 NHL games, all with Nashville.
But he’s a righty who plays the right side, which is a critical part of the bargain for the Rangers, who now can move John Moore back to his natural left defense position.
Moore, who appeared so promising last season after coming to the Blueshirts from Columbus at the deadline in the package for Marian Gaborik, had become a liability on the right, which is where he had played on the third pair the last 10 games in order to accommodate Del Zotto’s need/preference to play the left.
The Rangers are patching with Klein, who is in the first season of a five-year contract that carries an annual cap hit of $2.9 million. He’s averaging 18:48 of ice per game in 47 matches this season, much of which he has spent on the third pair, lately with Ryan Ellis.
If there’s an additional by-product here, it’s the impact it will have on negotiations with impending free agent second-pair right defenseman Anton Stralman, who is averaging 19:34 as Marc Staal’s partner and who could now be expected to seek in the neighborhood of $3.3 million per.
If Moore can regain some of the dynamic offensive thrust he provided last season by moving back to the left, this trade will have an impact. If not, then the deal essentially becomes about the Rangers cutting their losses with Del Zotto, who had become less dependable, more erratic and more of a problem as his career evolved.
It isn’t that coach Alain Vigneault lost confidence in Del Zotto, the Rangers’ 2008 first-round draft choice (20th overall) who was selected the NHL Rookie of the Month for October 2009, the first month he ever played in the league. It’s that Del Zotto, who was a healthy scratch nine times in the first 42 games, never was able to gain Vigneault’s confidence in the first place.
Maybe it was a case of too much too soon for Del Zotto. Maybe the Rangers rushed him, as former coach John Tortorella often suggested. But the defenseman, who had Ryan McDonagh and Marc Staal ahead of him on the left defense depth chart and wasn’t comfortable playing the right, never quite fulfilled his promise as an offensive weapon and never developed into a reliable enough defender.
Del Zotto regressed this season. He wasn’t able to consistently deliver the first pass or use his skating ability to beat the forecheck. His offensive zone game was incomplete. Though he could join the rush and was a reasonable option at the point on the second power-play unit, he couldn’t get his shot through regularly enough.
He and Moore were particularly deficient in Tuesday’s 5-3 defeat to the Islanders. The Rangers couldn’t have both go south on them.
So they sent Del Zotto — who has six years on Klein in addition to more upside but certainly not a more acceptable risk/reward ratio — south, instead.