Day: July 3, 2013

Henrik Lundqvist has been selected in the NHL Second All-Star Team, backing up his First All-Star Team selection from last year.  The defending Vezina Trophy winner earlier lost his title to Sergei Bobrovsky of the Columbus Blue Jackets, and finished second behind the same netminder in the All-Star voting.  Lundqvist recovered from a slow start, to lead the league with 24 wins, while playing in 43 games.

Lundqvist is heading into the final year of his contract, though the Rangers are talking to his agent about an extension that would keep him with the Rangers for several more seasons.

The Rangers finally made it official that Ulf Samuelsson has joined the Rangers as an Assistant to Head Coach Alain Vigneault, and also confirmed the hiring of former Blue Jackets Head Coach as a second Assistant.  

GM Glen Sather also indicated that the Rangers may not be done yet, following on from comments earlier by Vigneault that he’d like to have a third assistant who sits in the box.  The Rangers have also retained Goaltending coach Benoit Allaire.

There’s a lot of buy-outs going on right now, so I figured I’d take a look at how bad it’s been over the last several seasons.  Using CapGeek.com, I was able to take a look back to 2006 when they began keeping data – NOTE: this does not include the previous amnesty buy-outs from 2005, such as Bobby Holik.

It’s an interesting tale, dating back to July 1st 2006 through to around 4pm Eastern on July 3rd, 2013, teams have combined to buy out 77 contracts, for a total of 231 years and a total of $234,348,494.  That’s equivalent of about seven percent of the pre-lockout revenue total of $3.2B.