Rangers hold out Vincent Trocheck, Sam Carrick for 'roster management'
Rangers' Sam Carrick, left, and Vincent Trocheck. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The trades started coming on Tuesday and Wednesday, but nothing involved the most talked about player at this year’s trade deadline, Vincent Trocheck.
At the Rangers’ optional morning skate at their practice facility Thursday before their game at the Garden against the Maple Leafs, coach Mike Sullivan was asked if he knew whether Trocheck would be in the lineup for the game, or held out for “roster management.’’
“Right now, everybody’s a game-time decision,’’ he said.
About eight hours later, as the Rangers took the ice for warmups, the question on everyone’s mind was answered: Trocheck and fourth-line center Sam Carrick did not warm up and the Rangers announced neither would play.
Defenseman Braden Schneider, whose name had also surfaced in trade speculation, did warm up and was in the lineup.
Holding Trocheck and Carrick out suggested the Rangers will be working on trading both before Friday’s 3 p.m. deadline. Both are righthanded-shooting centers, a desired commodity among playoff-contending teams, especially as both kill penalties, and both win faceoffs (Trocheck is winning 57.2% and Carrick 53.9% this season). Trocheck also plays on the power play.
Meanwhile, the Maple Leafs, who, like the Rangers, are sellers at the deadline, held out three players – defenseman Oliver Ekman-Larsson and forwards Bobby McMann and Scott Laughton – for the second straight night. Toronto traded bottom-six center Nicolas Roy to Colorado earlier in the day.
“He was a guy we brought in (last summer, from Vegas in the Mitch Marner trade), and he's played pretty well for us,’’ Leafs coach Craig Berube said of Roy. “And it’s tough to see him go. But that's the situation we're in.’’
The Rangers are in the same situation, of course, thanks to their 23-29-8 record entering Thursday’s game and their last place standing in the Eastern Conference. On Jan. 16, general manager Chris Drury met with the players and then issued a statement on social media informing fans the team would be going through a “retool,’’ then he traded defenseman Carson Soucy and Artemi Panarin.
Both of those players, though, were in the final year of their contracts, and the Rangers had decided not to re-sign them. So it only made sense to trade them, rather than lose them for nothing over the summer if they left as free agents.
Trocheck and Carrick are different, though, in that they are not about to be free agents. Carrick has a year left on his contract, at a $1 million cap hit, and Trocheck has three more years after this, at a very reasonable salary cap number of $5.625 million.
There wasn’t the same urgency to trade the 32-year-old, an alternate captain who just helped Sullivan and the USA team win the Olympic gold medal. The only reason to move him, really, would be if the return for him was too good to pass up. With one of his top suitors, Minnesota, reportedly dropping out, and another, Colorado, having traded for Roy early Thursday, there are still several teams thought to be still in the hunt for him, but given that Roy brought back two draft picks, one a first-rounder, Drury is no doubt seeking a lot.
It’s been a stressful week, but it will all come to an end soon – though not too soon for Sullivan.
“Yeah, I just think the uncertainty of it all is the most difficult part of it, right?’’ he said. “For everybody, not just players. Everybody involved. This is just a -- it's never an easy time… leading up to this whole week. This is the reality of this time of year, leading up to the trade deadline, there's always the element of uncertainty with respect to rosters and potential trades and things of that nature. And, you know, it affects people's lives. That's not easy.’’
Without Trocheck and Carrick, and with captain J.T. Miller on injured reserve with an upper-body injury, the Rangers’ lineup against Toronto looked pretty thin. It’s likely going to be that way for the rest of the season.
Blue notes
Forward Adam Edstrom returned to the lineup after missing 33 games with a lower-body injury… Jonny Brodzinski skated in Trocheck’s spot on the second line, while Juuso Parssinen took Carrick’s spot on the fourth line, between Edstrom and Hartford callup Jaroslav Chmelar.
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.
