NHL new york Rangers

Ah yes, another July 1 passes and the Rangers make another splash in the free agent market. This year they signed the oft-injured and cranky Marian Gaborik to a five-year deal worth $37.5 million, and tough guy Donald Brashear for two years and $2.8 million. Also, former big July 1 signing, Scott Gomez, was shipped off to Montreal in a seven player deal that brought back forward Chris Higgins, among others.

But will all the superstar swaps and signings pay off for the Rangers? They've made similar moves for the past two years and have a grand total of eight playoff wins and a mid-season coaching change to show for it. So is this summer different, or are the Rangers sticking to the same big money strategy that has failed them before?

When Marian Gaborik turned down a ten-year, $78 million offer from the Wild last summer, it was clearly not just about the money.

After all, a $7.8 million annual average was about as much as he could possibly hope to earn, especially if he got a ten-year deal. Instead, this was about a fresh start for Gaborik. That fresh start will happen in New York, after Gaborik agreed to a five-year deal with the Rangers Wednesday evening.

Give Rangers general manager Glen Sather credit; he found somebody to take on one of the team's ugly contracts when he sent Scott Gomez to the Montreal Canadiens for Chris Higgins, Doug Janik, Ryan McDonagh and Pavel Valentenko on Tuesday afternoon. Gomez, 29, signed a seven-year, $51 million deal with the Rangers prior to the 2007-08 season, and the signing proved to be a mistake from the very beginning.

It's officially the offseason, meaning the time is right to look into the future. We continue our division-by-division preview of the potential wheeling and dealing with the Atlantic Division.

It will be an interesting summer for the five teams in the Atlantic. Four teams made the playoffs, including the eventual Stanley Cup champion, and the one team that didn't make it -- the New York Islanders -- holds the first pick in Friday's draft, which isn't a bad consolation prize. All around it was a pretty successful season for these five teams.

The real NHL awards will be handed out Thursday night in Las Vegas, so FanHouse decided to hand out its own special awards for the 2008-09 season.

It takes a special player to get paid a lot of money. In the salary cap era, you expect guys who are signed to big-money deals to produce. When they disappear into the Witness Protection Program, it's usually a notable occurrence. With that said, we present nominees for the 2008-2009 Witness Protection Award, and boy do we have some options to pick from.

As the puck squirted past goalie Simeon Varlamov, giving the Pittsburgh Penguins a 4-3 overtime victory over the Washington Capitals in Game 5 of their second round playoff series on Saturday night, part of me expected to feel crushed. After all, this series marks the eighth time the two teams have met in the postseason, with Pittsburgh taking six of the previous seven meetings. Now, after watching the Caps take the opening two games on home ice, the Penguins have roared back and now hold a 3-2 series lead going into Game 6 tonight back in Pittsburgh.

So why am I not crushed? Simply put, I have passed this way before, and the feeling is all too familiar.

Just a few minutes ago as he sat at a podium following his team's 4-3 overtime loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins, it was obvious that Washington Capitals head coach Bruce Boudreau was more angry than heartbroken.

Who could blame him? Washington, a team that got two goals from the best player in the world, Alex Ovechkin, had played its most complete game of the series, yet still couldn't find a way to win.

In the end, this game turned on two sequences on either end of the ice in the overtime period. The first came early in the period when Washington center Dave Steckel, one of his team's more consistent performers, couldn't put the puck into an open net early. The second came just a few minutes later, as an Evgeni Malkin pass intended for Sidney Crosby deflected off the stick of sprawling Capitals defenseman Tom Poti and through the legs of a stunned Simeon Varlamov.

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Credit Ken Belson at the New York Times for digging an interesting nugget from the depths of the latest earnings report from Cablevision: the entertainment conglomerate is exploring a spinoff of Madison Square Garden and all of its entertainment holdings -- including the NBA's Knicks, the NHL's Rangers and the WNBA Liberty.

Here's Ilya Kovalchuk of the Atlanta Thrashers holding forth on why the Washington Capitals are going to make it to the Stanley Cup Finals. Kovalchuk is currently in Switzerland playing with the Russian national team in the 2009 IIHF World Championship.

Thanks to our buddy Dmitry Chesnokov, Washington correspondent for Sovetsky Sport, for passing along the video.

Markus Naslund, at one point earlier in the decade an elite winger, has decided to retire. Naslund would be entering the last year of a two-year, $8 million contract with the Rangers in a five-year point decline that saw him disappointingly put up 46 in New York in 2008-09. Unable to keep up with John Tortorella's fast-paced scheme, Naslund could have forced the Rangers to buy out his deal and pocket some money, but he chose to retire outright instead. [New York Post]