Rangers trade pending free agents Jimmy Vesey, Ryan Lindgren to Avalanche
New York Rangers defenseman Ryan Lindgren sets before a face off against the Carolina Hurricanes in the first period of an NHL hockey game at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Dec. 22, 2024. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
GREENBURGH — The NHL trade deadline is Friday, but Rangers general manager Chris Drury didn’t wait until the last minute.
The Rangers on Saturday traded a pair of pending unrestricted free agents in defenseman Ryan Lindgren and winger Jimmy Vesey, along with unsigned prospect defenseman Hank Kampf, to the Colorado Avalanche for forward Juuso Parssinen, defenseman Calvin deHaan and two conditional draft choices, a second-rounder and a fourth-rounder in this summer’s NHL Draft. The Rangers are retaining 50% of Lindgren’s $4.5 million salary.
The second-round pick is the better of Carolina’s or the Rangers’ own second-rounder (which previously was traded to Arizona, then traded to Colorado) and the fourth-rounder is the better of Colorado’s or Vancouver’s.
Lindgren, 26, was one of the first players acquired when the Rangers started their rebuild in February 2018. He came over as an unsigned prospect from Boston in the trade that sent Rick Nash to the Bruins.
He played 387 games for the Rangers, most of them as the steady partner for Adam Fox, and had 12 goals and 99 points overall, including two goals and 19 points in 54 games this season. He played a physical game and shed plenty of blood for the team, earning the fans’ love and several coaching staffs’ respect.
But after starting this season on injured reserve after a preseason fight with the Islanders’ Scott Mayfield, he didn’t have his finest year.
Vesey, 31, originally signed with the Rangers as a college free agent in 2016, was traded to Buffalo in 2019, then bounced around to Toronto, Vancouver and New Jersey before returning to the Rangers in 2022, making the team after a training camp tryout.
Vesey started this season on long-term injured reserve and was in and out of the lineup when he returned, contributing four goals and two assists in 33 games.
The move allowed the Rangers to get assets back for two players who would have been lost to free agency this summer. DeHaan, 33, also is a pending UFA who is making $800,000 this season. Parssinen, 24, will be a restricted free agent with arbitration rights. He currently makes $775,000.
The trade gives the Rangers eight picks in this summer’s draft. They don’t have a first-round pick, having traded it to Vancouver in the J.T. Miller deal, but before Saturday, they also didn’t have their own second-rounder, third-rounder or fourth-rounder.
The Rangers did own Seattle’s third-rounder from the Kaapo Kakko trade and two fourth-rounders: one belonging to either Boston, Detroit or Anaheim as a result of the Jacob Trouba trade to Anaheim and one belonging to Dallas, from the Nils Lundkvist trade in 2022. Now they have a second-round pick and three fourth-rounders.
The Rangers also have only one pending UFA (besides deHaan) on the roster in Reilly Smith.
Drury could look to move Smith, who has 10 goals, 19 assists and a minus-1 rating in 58 games, by the deadline.
DeHaan, a 6-1, 191-pounder who was a first-round pick by the Islanders in 2009, likely will replace Lindgren in the lineup. He has no goals and seven assists in 44 games this season and 24 goals and 124 assists in 676 games in his career.
Parssinen, a 6-3, 212-pounder who was taken in the seventh round of the 2019 draft by Nashville, has four goals and seven assists in 37 games this season and 18 goals and 30 assists in 126 games in his career.
The Rangers began Saturday four points out of a wild-card spot. With 23 games remaining in the season, they still could make the playoffs. But it’s doubtful that Drury — despite having plenty of space under the salary cap — will be looking to add pieces at the deadline to help them do so.
After winning the Presidents’ Trophy for the best record in the league in the 2023-24 regular season, the Rangers have shown that they are not a real Stanley Cup contender this season. The shoulder injury suffered by Fox in Tuesday’s game against the Islanders certainly doesn’t help.
Drury already has done major work to reshape the roster in-season, having traded Trouba and Kakko in December before making the big move to acquire Miller from Vancouver on Jan. 31.
Will Kreider be traded?
If there’s one more big move remaining, it could be moving on from Chris Kreider, the longest-tenured Ranger.
Ever since the report leaked out after Thanksgiving that Drury had sent out a memo to the other league general managers that he was looking to make trades — and Trouba and Kreider were mentioned by name as being available — it’s been widely assumed that he has been trying to trade Kreider. The complication is that Kreider, whose 17 goals are tied with Vincent Trocheck for second-most on the team, has been bothered by a bad back all season and has missed the last three games.
On Saturday, Kreider was placed on injured reserve with an upper-body injury, and it is difficult to see how Drury would be able to convince teams not on Kreider’s 15-team no-trade list to trade for him now.
The Rangers called up winger Brett Berard from Hartford to take Kreider’s place on the 23-man roster.
Colin Stephenson covers the Rangers for Newsday. He has spent more than two decades covering the NHL and just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
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