McKenzie: "The Rangers have reached out to Zuccarello"
/Bob McKenzie was on NBCSN’s Intermission Report on Wednesday evening.
On if the New York Rangers are working on a contract with Mats Zuccarello:
“The Rangers are interested in signing him and he’s interested in signing back with the New York Rangers, but it gets a little complicated. There’s a cap crunch coming up. Everybody is worried about what the cap is going to be next year. Is it going to go up very much? Is it not going to go up at all? Could it shrink a little bit?
“They’ve got restricted free agents they’ve got to sign: Derek Stepan is in for a huge raise. Carl Hagelin. Same thing. J.T. Miller and John Moore to a lesser degree. And now you’ve got Marty St. Louis. Unrestricted free agent. And you’ve got Mats Zuccarello. Unrestricted free agent.
“The Rangers have reached out to Zuccarello and said they are interested in trying to do something with him. And as I said, he wants to stay in New York. But the question becomes how much money, how much term can they give him. Especially when they don’t know what the cap is going to be. So there’s been no substantive negotiations or talks to this point in time, but those things will happen and we’ll see if they can find a way to get this done.
“It may be one of those situations where the Rangers simply say, ‘This is all we’ve got. It’s not going to be much of a negotiation. We’ll give you this many years for this amount of money. If you want to stay, that’s what we can do. If you don’t want to stay, and you want to go to unrestricted free agency, then that’s up to you.' ”
Source: NBCSN/ Transcript: Nichols on Hockey
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