Rangers and Artemi Panarin on Different Wave Lengths in Terms of Contract
Vince Mercogliano of The Athletic joined Sirius XM NHL Network Radio with Scott Laughlin and Gord Stellick and was asked about the contract situation involving Artemi Panarin with the New York Rangers.
NHLRumors.com Transcriptions
Scott Laughlin: Vince Mercogliano talking Rangers with us here on the NHL Morning Skate. So you mentioned Panarin and how much he still drives offense up front. It seems like lately people are talking more about his haircut than they are about a contract extension. What are you hearing on that, Vince, with regards to Panarin? Now, he’s 34. My guess would be that because he’s 34, there may be a difference of opinion in terms of what the term is going to look like in this contract. Do you see this getting done at some point?
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Vince Mercogliano: Yeah, definitely term, I think, is going to be an issue here, from what I’ve heard. And I actually asked Panarin, myself, actually, to be frank with you, we were talking the day that he shaved his head. I sat down with him for a bit of an interview after practice that day, and that’s when he was in that slump. And I was kind of asking him what was going on. And unprompted, he brought up, there’s a lot of stuff going on.
The negativity starts to seep in when I’m not scoring. And he brought up, it’s a contract year, and it’s hard for me to kind of block that out of my mind. So that prompted me to then respond by asking, Well, where do things stand with the contract negotiations right now?
What he told me is that it’s basically pretty quiet. Now, could that have changed in the last couple weeks? It’s possible, but I certainly haven’t heard anything to the contrary. And my understanding, as far as the Rangers thinking on this, is that they really aren’t in any rush to jump into any new deal with Panarin at this point.
When you mentioned the age, I think they very much want to see how this season plays out, how productive he is, but they also are looking at a situation that’s pretty unique compared to where they’ve been in recent off seasons. Where in the past, in the recent past, they’ve usually gone into the summer pretty tight on salary cap space.
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Where this coming summer, they’re looking at over $30 million in available cap space. So I think that they are looking forward to having that kind of flexibility, and they don’t want to just tie up a bunch of that money this early in the process. They want to wait to see how the market materializes.
Now, the downside for them, or the negative thing for them right now, is that a lot of the big names, the star-level players, (Connor) McDavid, (Kirill) Kaprizov, (Jack) Eichel, whoever you want to say that they were hoping might make it to free agency next summer, a lot of those guys are getting locked up right now, so the free agent market is looking thinner and thinner, really, by the week, it feels like recently.
So that’s not a good thing for the Rangers, because they’re going to have all this cap space. But what are they going to spend it on is the question if starting the feel, to me more like (Chris) Drury, is going to have to get creative somehow, that might mean a trade. Who knows what could be out there by the time we get to the summer?
But again, I think they want to wait and let things materialize, figure out exactly what might be available to them, and that’s why they don’t want to jump into any extensions with Panarin right now because they might want to allocate that money elsewhere. I think very much right now they want to keep their options open.
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And while it sounds to me like Panarin would like to stay, I also think that he’s not of the mind right now to be giving a big discount, or certainly not taking fewer years than he would like to take. And so I also think that there’s an impasse as far as that, because if the Rangers do anything with him at this early juncture, I think it’s very much going to have to be on their terms, which means probably not so many years and a lower AAV, certainly than what he’s at right now, at $11.6 million per season.
So I just feel like right now the two sides are seeing things very differently, and the Rangers are content to kind of wait and see how things play out.
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