Rangers sign veteran center Mika Zibanejad to eight-year, $68M extension

The New York Rangers announced Sunday morning that they’ve extended center Mika Zibanejad. The New York Post’s Larry Brooks reports an eight-year deal with a cap hit in the $8.5M range.

Zibanejad’s extension will begin in the 2022-23 season, taking him through 2028-29 — his age-37 season. He was scheduled to become an unrestricted free agent at the conclusion of this campaign.

With Zibanejad’s $8.5M reported cap hit, it’s an increase of a little more than $3M on his previous $5.35M AAV. The center is coming off a five-year, $26.75M deal he signed with the Rangers prior to the 2017-18 season.

The contract has immediate salary-cap ramifications for the Rangers, who’ll have a busy and challenging offseason ahead of them at the conclusion of this season. The Rangers are projected to have $20.2M in space next year with the cap increasing to $82.5M. That space is all they have to re-sign Adam Fox, Kaapo Kakko, Vitali Kravtsov, Sammy Blais and Alexandar Georgiev, as well as filling out the rest of their roster. They’re handicapped by a $3.4M cap penalty from the combined buyouts of Kevin Shattenkirk, Dan Girardi and Anthony DeAngelo.

Throughout his 604-game NHL career, Zibanejad’s scored 200 goals, 234 assists and 434 points. He’s averaged more than 20 minutes a game for the Rangers for three consecutive seasons, cementing his role as a bonafide top-line center. He scored 24 goals and 50 points during last season’s shortened 56-game campaign.

Drafted sixth overall by the Senators in 2011, he’s done his best work away from the team that drafted him after Ottawa shipped him away to the Rangers in 2016 in exchange for Derick Brassard. He’s scored 283 points in 323 games as a Ranger.

Theoretically, this deal also had a direct impact on another New York squad. The Rangers have long been linked as a possible destination for former Buffalo Sabres captain Jack Eichel via trade. Yet an eight-year commitment of this magnitude to a player who has served as their first-line center for years now would suggest that the Rangers have placed their bets in-house on a center that can take them to a Stanley Cup.