The New York Rangers lost Igor Shesterkin for the season to knee surgery, and within hours half the internet had him replaced by Connor Hellebuyck of the Winnipeg Jets. The obvious version of that deal, where New York takes Hellebuyck now and flips him somewhere else in the summer, runs straight into a wall.
Elliotte Friedman laid out why on 32 Thoughts.
“You can’t write it down and say, all right, we’re trading Connor Hellebuyck to the Rangers today and the Rangers agree to trade him to X team on, say, June 25th. You can’t do that,” Friedman said.
Can Connor Hellebuyck be traded to the Rangers?
Quebec agreed to send Eric Lindros to Philadelphia in June 1992. Within 80 minutes, president Marcel Aubut changed his mind and verbally promised him to the Rangers instead. Both clubs insisted they had him. An arbitrator spent most of that month untangling the mess before awarding Lindros to the Flyers on June 30.
The league’s response was to create the Central Registry, a department that every trade and every signing in hockey now has to pass through for approval. Friedman says that is precisely what rules out a future-dated clause on a Hellebuyck deal.
“They won’t allow that. The whole point is to avoid something where that becomes an issue,” Friedman said. “They would say, okay, you can make this trade now, but you can’t put anything that says we do this something here in six months.”
READ MORE: Friedman lays out the ending nobody in Winnipeg wants
What the league can’t police is what two general managers say to each other.
“If the Rangers want to make a side deal with someone and say we’ll trade you Hellebuyck in six months and this is the deal, the two can shake on it and say we’ll do it then,” Friedman said. “But everybody has to live up to it, and the NHL wouldn’t enforce it. They won’t enforce anything that’s not on paper.”
So the mechanism exists. It just requires both sides to keep their word with nothing to compel them.
Friedman doesn’t expect any of it to happen. He has repeatedly said the fit doesn’t work, pointing out that both goaltenders carry long-term contracts and that a ton of the Rangers’ players have trade protection, which makes assembling a package awkward.
“Unless there’s a three-way deal there, I don’t see a path for that deal to get done,” Friedman said. “I just don’t see the deal, but I understand. If I was running the Rangers, I’d think about it, especially if they continue to play well.”
Carolina remains the club most strongly linked to Hellebuyck, and Friedman has reported that the Hurricanes explored a three-way construction involving Alexander Nikishin and the Rangers earlier this offseason. New York, for now, is going with 24-year-old Dylan Garand.
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