Rangers Trade Pitch Brings in $13 Million Left-Shot Defenseman in Zac Jones Swap

One season after getting to the NHL’s Eastern Conference Finals for the second time in three years, the New York Rangers failed to make the playoffs at all this time around. After starting the season on a 12-4-1 hot streak, the wheels came off as they won just four of the next 19 games with 15 losses, effectively sealing their fate.

Not surprisingly, two days after the regular season wrapped up, New York fired head coach Peter Laviolette, who guided the Rangers to the conference finals in his first season at Madison Square Garden, but was not given another chance after this season’s failure.

On Friday, the Rangers found their new top man, their fifth head coach in the last decade, when they hired former Penguins boss Mike Sullivan, who led Pittsburgh to back-to-back Stanley Cups in 2016 and 2017 but had missed the postseason in each of the last three years.

But even with the coaching question answered, there will be more changes to come in New York as the organization attempts to rebuild while navigating a delicate salary cap situation. Currently, the Rangers have a thin $1.7 million of cap space, ranking them 13th in the NHL.

For Rangers, Miller Decision Must Come First

Their first priority will be making a decision on defenseman K’Andre Miller, the Rangers 2018 first-round draft pick. An arbitration-eligible restricted free agent, the 25-year-old finds himself a leading trade candidate, as he would be seeking a substantial raise over the $3.87 million paycheck he received each of the last two seasons.

Which direction general manager Chris Drury goes in the Miller negotiations also has an impact on the remainder of the roster. As Eric Charles of the influential Forever Blueshirts site pointed out on Thursday, “there’s reason to believe that if Miller, a restricted free agent with arbitration rights, can be retained at a reasonable cost, Carson Soucy is expendable. Assuming Zac Jones is not in the plans for regular duty — again — next season, he’s expendable, as well.”

Charles pitched a trade that would allow Jones, a 2019 third-round draft pick out of the University of Massachusetts, a greater opportunity to see ice time, while adding some apparently much needed toughness to the Rangers defense.

Durable, Left-Shot Defenseman Would Add Toughness

The Forever Blueshirts scribe urges Drury “to contact the San Jose Sharks and look into a possible trade for Mario Ferraro.”

On the NHL’s worst team, and with Ferraro out of the way, Jones would likely get the chance to play on a regular basis that he has been missing to this point in his career.

A six-year veteran, Toronto native Ferraro also played his college hockey at Massachusetts. The Sharks made him a third round draft pick in 2019, and now according to Erika Towne of the Fear the Fin site, “instantly became the Sharks’ best defenseman” when San Jose traded away Erik Karlsson before the 2023-2024 season after he had won the Norris Trophy the previous year.

The 25-year-old Ferraro missed the end of the season with a broken ankle suffered on April 9, but the injury did not require surgery and the left-shot d-man is expected to be fully ready for the 2025-2026 season when training cap opens.

The ankle injury aside, durability has been one of Ferraro’s signature assets. He played in 78 games in each of the last two seasons, and 72 the year before that. But all of that effort has gone for little in return, with the Sharks missing the playoffs every season of Ferraro’s six-year career.

With only 52 points, San Jose posted the worst record in the NHL in 2024-2025.

Ferraro will enter the final season of his four-year, $13 million contract with the Sharks — meaning that the Sharks are likely to move him at the red deadline next season if he is not traded away over the summer.