Rangers Tender Offers...Await Players Response

The New York Rangers sent offers to their player agents yesterday and await the response from their agents.

Who will sign on the dotted line?

Rumour has it that career minor leaguers Dale Purinton, Tomi Karlsson, Kristofer Ottoson, and Brad Church have all accepted contracts and that Espen Knutsen and Niko Dimitrakos will both be cut loose by the Rangers.

The Rangers are in good position going into the resigning period in terms of the number of players without contracts as they only have four. Management in New York still has to be sweating a bit though as team leading goal scorer Pavel Bure, captain JP Dumont, assistant captain Mike Ribeirio, and young superstar Rick Nash are the players in question.

"We've got a dilemma in terms of who to use our Franchise Player option on," said GM David Burns in an phone interview. "Those are four very important players to our team. We want them all back but contract negotiation is a tricky business. Pavel is unrestricted so our chances of retaining him are about 50/50 without the Franchise player option. With our RFA's we're about 75% sure they'll sign. There's three of them so the odds are still in our favour but we're really worried about losing any of them. We dealt a quality scorer in Radek Dvorak to get Mario in the hopes of making a cup run so we can't afford to lose any more players. Our biggest concern on the RFA front is retaining Rick Nash. We're leaning towards using our Franchise Player option on him or Bure."

If the Rangers come out of the re-signing period unscathed they'll have a solid core and some cap space to go after some free agents. If one or more players hold out the Rangers are hinting that they will match any offers and trade the players. Whatever happens the next few days will be critical in determining the Rangers chance bettering last years excellent season.