New Jersey Devils get: Right wing Michael Grabner
New York Rangers get: Defenseman Yegor Rykov, 2018 second-round pick
Follow all the trade deadline action here.
New Jersey Devils: B-plus
The Devils made a trade with the Rangers! For the first time in history. Hamburgers are eating people. Dogs and cats are living together ... it's mass hysteria!
That's right: These two archrivals had never made a trade before Thursday night's rental of right wing Michael Grabner by New Jersey. The last time the Rangers made a deal with this Devils franchise was in November 1979, when they acquired Barry Beck from the then-Colorado Rockies roughly eight years before Grabner was born.
It's a timely move for the Devils, who are in a 4-6-0 stretch while occupying the first wild-card spot, five points up on the Islanders. Grabner, 30, has 25 goals and six assists in 59 games for the Rangers; during the past two seasons, he has 52 goals in 135 games. He's renowned for his speed, and he joins a team that loves to press the tempo.
From a lineup perspective, this move is intended to take some heat off of Taylor Hall, who has basically been the Devils' offense the past few weeks, having scored at least a point in each of his past 20 games played. Hall has 26 goals; before the trade, no other player on the Devils had more than 16 goals. Grabner slots nicely on the Devils' second line with center Pavel Zacha and winger Jesper Bratt. The Devils have the eighth-best penalty kill in the NHL, and Grabner will bolster it. And he does so at a bargain price with just a $1.65 million cap hit this season, which comes off the books when he hits free agency this summer.
So there's a lot to like here, but there's also stuff that makes you scratch your head. What other 25-goal scorer has averaged three seconds per game on the power play? And those six assists are weird. Only one player in the past 40 years has had a season with 25 goals and single-digit assists in a non-lockout-affected season: Brian Savage in 1995-96, with 25 goals and eight helpers. With that speed, why isn't he more of a playmaker, having never topped 20 assists in a season?
But for the Devils, those conundrums are worth exploring for a really decent fit to their lineup and system. In car rental terms: They didn't need to splurge for a SUV, and an economy car wouldn't do them any better. So they opted for a mid-sized model with a heck of an engine.
New York Rangers: A-minus
According to a source, the Rangers quickly found the market for Grabner wasn't going to net them a first-rounder, so the focus became a second-rounder and a prospect. Since the prices weren't expected to change heading into Monday's deadline, general manager Jeff Gorton pulled the trigger on Thursday night.
There were other suitors, so why cut a deal with the Devils? Well, their second-round pick seems like it'll be higher than the other contenders looking to rent -- somewhere in the middle of the round -- and because the prospect they targeted has some real upside.
Rykov is a 20-year-old from Russia who has split time between SKA St. Petersburg and the VHL, which is the KHL's developmental league. A fifth-round pick in 2016, he won World Junior silver (2016) and bronze (2017) with the Russian national team, collecting a goal and six assists.
The Rangers' scouts are high on him. He has good size and can move the puck. The biggest question is when he'll move to North America, which makes assigning this grade difficult. But a decent pick and a potentially quite good prospect for a rental (who could end up back in New York)? Not a bad way to start the trade-deadline rebuild.