OTTAWA, Ontario — Chris Drury said he wanted to thread the needle for the Rangers ahead of Friday’s 3 p.m. trade deadline.
To do so in a season that has been difficult to find hope in but is not yet hopeless, the Rangers president and general manager strived to make moves that made the most sense for the future while not sacrificing the team’s competitiveness for this final 20-game push to qualify for the 2024-25 playoffs.
“Trying to make sure we got some assets back for our [unrestricted free agents] for the future, whether it’s a young player like [Brendan] Brisson or some picks, another young player in [Juuso] Parssinen, while trying to show the group I still believe in them — which I do,” Drury said on a conference call with reporters a couple hours after the deadline passed. “As we push to the playoffs, push to try and make the playoffs and give them some NHL players in [Calvin] de Haan, Parssinen, [Carson] Soucy this last week to try and help the group get to the playoffs.”
After leveraging three of their impending unrestricted free agents — Ryan Lindgren, Jimmy Vesey and Reilly Smith — in a couple of trades earlier this week that restocked some draft/prospect capital and padded the defense, signing in-season acquisition Urho Vaakanainen to a two-year extension with an average annual value of $1.55 million was Drury’s main order of business on Friday.
That’s because all that Drury wanted to accomplish had already been achieved earlier this week.
The only other move Drury made on Friday was an AHL player exchange with the Sabres, in which he sent Erik Brannstrom — acquired with J.T. Miller from Vancouver on Jan. 31 — to Buffalo in exchange for Nicolas Aube-Kubel.
Aube-Kubel, who comes with 301 games of NHL experience over nine seasons, will report to the team’s AHL affiliate, the Hartford Wolf Pack.
So all the Rangers on the MSG Training Center ice Friday afternoon boarded the team plane to Ottawa.
That included Chris Kreider, who is still the longest tenured Ranger after hearing his name on the trade block since November.
The fact that he’s on injured reserve with his third separate injury of the season certainly affected his trade value, but The Post’s Larry Brooks reported the Rangers weren’t necessarily shopping Kreider, just listening.
“I’m certainly not going to get into any private talks I have with other teams on players or anything else, but I’m really excited Chris is here,” Drury said. “He’s been a terrific Ranger for a long time. In some ways, if and when he does plays — hopefully, which is relatively soon — it’ll be almost like a trade-deadline acquisition with him and Adam [Fox coming off IR]. We all know what Chris is capable of and when he’s on his game, he impacts our lineup in a big-time way.”
The Rangers have made six notable trades since Dec. 6, an indication of the retooling that’s essentially been in the works since former captain Jacob Trouba was sent to Anaheim.
The team that will end this season will look a heck of a lot different than the one that started it.
With an abundance of players set to become restricted free agents this summer, this feels like only the beginning of several changes for the Rangers.
“We looked at a lot of different things,” Drury said when asked if he was looking to use more of the just over $13.4 million cap space the Rangers still have. “Some of those opportunities came up. Obviously, the trades we made, made sense. Some of the other stuff that we looked at didn’t make sense. We’re always just trying to make the best decisions we can with the information we have. This is what we ended up doing.”
