This past weekend, we saw former Devils winger Nikita Gusev accept a contract termination to give him a chance to catch on somewhere else to finish the season. While rare, there could have been a second one of these this year as TSN’s Darren Dreger reports (Twitter link) that the Rangers approached defenseman Anthony DeAngelo about this scenario, noting that Montreal was among the teams interested in him if he was to become an unrestricted free agent. However, the blueliner declined and will instead be bought out this summer.
DeAngelo was waived in late January after an altercation with Alexandar Georgiev and after clearing, he was assigned to the taxi squad where he has remained ever since. However, he has not been with the team since then and while they were attempting to loan him to an AHL club last month, that clearly didn’t materialize.
While it may seem odd that DeAngelo turned down a chance to play again this season, there is definitely a financial component to consider. He would have had to walk away from the remainder of his $4.3M salary this season. It would depend on when the termination was to occur to do an exact calculation but it would have been with somewhere around 30% of the season left, which works out to roughly a $1.29M forfeiture. On top of that, he wouldn’t have collected any of his $5.3M salary for next season. While it appears he could have had a chance to play elsewhere, that’s still a lot of money to walk away from.
Instead, as expected, the Rangers will buy him out this summer, making him an unrestricted free agent at that time. As a 25-year-old, he’ll only be entitled to one-third of the salary over two years instead of the standard two-thirds which means he’ll collect $1.767M while New York will incur cap charges of $383K next year and $883K in 2022-23, per CapFriendly.
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