Rangers Keep Fedotenko On

The New York Rangers have come to terms with their leading preseason scorer Ruslan Fedotenko, signing the scoring forward to a new 1-year, $1 million deal on Monday. Fedotenko has been attending camp on a professional tryout basis and is one of a few players that have signed on with their tryout club before the season starts.

In 2010 with the Penguins, Fedotenko had 30 points in 80 games, including 11 goals, which actually had him ranked fairly low in overall league scoring.  In the preseason these past couple of weeks, Fedotenko picked up 7 points in the 5 games he played in, which was good enough to lead the Rangers and helped to earn him this contract.

Forwards	Defense	Goalies
Marian Gaborik	Michael Del Zotto	Henrik Lundqvist
Vaclav Prospal	Marc Staal	Martin Biron
Alexander Frolov	Dan Girardi
Brandon Dubinsky	Michal Rozsival
Ryan Callahan	Steve Eminger
Chris Drury	Matt Gilroy
Sean Avery	Mike Sauer
Ruslan Fedotenko
Artem Anisimov
Tim Kennedy
Erik Christensen
Todd White
Brandon Prust
Brian Boyle
Derek Boogaard
Derek Stepan

With this signing in place, the Rangers now have 25 players signed onto their active roster (as seen above), with an annual cap projection of $60.1 million, which is only $700,000 over the salary cap ceiling.  There is an expectation that Chris Drury will start the year on the injured reserve and there is a chance that Vaclav Prospal may start the year with him on the list, which will make some room for the extra players on the list, but that may not solve their small cap problem at the moment.  Stay tuned for more happenings before Wednesday's deadline.

As of right now, Fedotenko doesn't really have any direct implications to the pool, since he wasn't picked in the draft or listed on the selection sheet. However, Fedotenko's impact may come at the first waiver draft, where draft participants will be able to swap out players that are underachieving or injured for the long-term.  I'm sure if Fedotenko is good enough to be picked, he won't be hard to keep track of.