Plenty of news today for the Rangers, on account of the NHL entry draft, and of course the counter claim by the NHL that has the potential (albeit unlikely) to take over the Rangers’ franchise from the Dolans.

First the Draft. As mentioned yesterday, you catch the first round tonight on Versus in the US (RDS and TSN in Canada) and NHL.TV is saying they will also broadcast it online. Draft kicks of at 7:00pm EDT and is just the one round tonight.

For those of you with the NHL Network, you can catch rounds 2-7 tomorrow beginning 9:30am Eastern. This will be a first in the US.

The Rangers go into tonight’s first round with the 20th overall pick. Gord Clark will once again run the draft, and he will look at moving up, though a move into the top 6 he says is probably unrealistic.

Larry Brooks of the NY Post says the Rangers won’t trade up, and tells us that none of the Rangers’ top five pending UFAs (Jaromir Jagr, Brendan Shanahan, Sean Avery, Michal Rozsival and Martin Straka) will receive offers before July 1st.

Who the Rangers will pick is anyone’s guess at this stage. It’s hard to project who’ll be left at #20, though you can of course check out the summarized projections from the most popular ranking services at our Draft Page.

With respect to the counter claim…

It’s certainly stirred up interest around the league, with The Globe and Maile (another story) and Toronto Star no doubt happy to highlight the dysfunctions of a team other than the Leafs.

In the local press, there are stories from The Newark Star Ledger, New York Times, Bergen Record, NY Daily News, Journal News and New York Post.