A risk-reward player acquired in a risk-reward deal. That’s Keith Yandle, a substantial player, albeit with warts, acquired on Sunday by the Rangers in a go-for-broke move engineered by never patient but increasingly impatient general manager Glen Sather, who also won his stare-down with Mats Zuccarello in getting the Norwegian first-liner to agree to a deal worth $4.5 million per for four seasons.
Yandle is a puck-moving, offense-oriented defenseman who has been a power-play weapon throughout his eight years spent wandering in the desert as a Coyote. Yandle does tend to do that, you know — wander, I mean — just as he tends from time to time to turn the puck over in high-leverage situations.
Be prepared. This isn’t the second coming of Brian Leetch. But the acquisition of the 28-year-old does represent a significant upgrade over the John Moore/Matt Hunwick rotation on the third pair, which had grown into the team’s most troublesome problem area. Saturday’s blue line simply wasn’t good enough or deep enough to get through three playoff rounds.
Monday’s blue line might be. And in order to justify this bold trade, in which Sather dealt away a 2016 first-rounder plus the Blueshirts’ most promising and NHL-ready prospect in Anthony Duclair (plus Moore), this blue line had better be good enough to get the Rangers back to the Cup final for another kick at the can they’ve lifted once in 74 years.
Because if the Rangers, on their way to the playoffs for the ninth time in the 10-year hard-cap era, have become all about now, the only way to define this trade as a success is if they can repeat as Eastern Conference champions and then take it that final step.
That’s a lot on Yandle, that’s a lot on the team, and that’s a lot on the coach, Alain Vigneault. The Rangers are a better team now than they were 48 hours ago, and that’s the idea, but the deal sure doesn’t separate them from the pack of upper-echelon Eastern contenders that features Montreal, Tampa Bay, Detroit, Pittsburgh and the Islanders.
And it comes at a heavy price, the cost of which in tomorrows won’t be fully calculable until days and days after tomorrow. One thing you’ve got to say about Sather: He sure doesn’t believe in Fleetwood Mac’s advice about tomorrow. He simply can’t, having now traded away four consecutive first-round selections from 2013 through 2016 in order to acquire Rick Nash, Martin St. Louis and Yandle.
In order to have made this move — one which, coupled with Zuccarello’s extension, undoubtedly will fill the room with positive energy — the Rangers must have reason to believe Henrik Lundqvist remains on track for a return under the original four- to six-week timeline that would allow a return by the second or third week of the month. It’s not likely the Blueshirts are operating under blind faith here, either.
You may believe Yandle is a redundancy on a team with Dan Boyle, though Yandle is better in his own end. (Aside: Isn’t he? Second aside: He’d better be.) In fact, while Yandle gives Vigneault additional options and an additional weapon, it also creates a conundrum for the coach, who probably won’t be able to pair Yandle and Boyle, and thus will likely unite Boyle with Marc Staal and Yandle with Kevin Klein.
The problem is Staal often faces the top line as a road match. When paired with Klein, that’s no issue. Paired with Boyle, that’s an issue. It could be that Yandle-Klein becomes the second pair, with Staal-Boyle as the third. That might get a bit tricky.
Yandle is coming at a bargain $2.625 million cap hit, with Arizona assuming an equal amount on the contract that runs through next season. Hey, absent an extension before next year’s deadline, maybe Sather can get a first back for Yandle as a rental. Or maybe another Kevin Hayes will fall into their collective lap as a collegian eschewing his draft team to become a free agent following his senior year.
But regardless of how sensible the cap hit is for a player of Yandle’s pedigree, that $2.625 million added to the 2015-16 spreadsheet further squeezes an already stressed cap situation. The entire season lies ahead for the Rangers, and by extension, for Boyle, but Yandle’s acquisition could well precipitate a June buyout of Boyle that would save $3 million of space.
Sather went bold. The Rangers should be emboldened. They’re set. Their depth is in quality, not necessarily quantity. A team with Marc Staal or Keith Yandle on the third pair is formidable. The top six with Zuccarello — who instructed his agents to make the best deal possible with the Rangers, knowing it would be at a discount off what he could have commanded on the open market — is formidable. The goaltending is more than formidable.
The Rangers are as good as anybody in the East. And they are a better team Monday than they were on Sunday. In other words, better today than yesterday in a place called Rangerstown, in which “tomorrow” is no longer in the vocabulary.