Chris Kreider just got waived by the Anaheim Ducks for what’s being called a mutual contract termination, and “mutual” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Elliotte Friedman had it before anyone else, and once Kreider clears waivers he’s a free agent who gets to go find a team on the only coast that ever actually felt like home.
He’s 35, he’s a Massachusetts guy, and he spent his first 13 seasons with the New York Rangers before Anaheim traded for him hoping he’d fit in with the winger group growing up around Cutter Gauthier. One season later, the Ducks are letting him walk instead of eating an extra draft pick or two to make a trade work. That tells you exactly how the experiment actually went.
I watched that jersey number patrol the front of the net at the Garden for over a decade. Seeing it look like a mistake somewhere else stings more than it probably should.
Kreider put up 22 goals and 28 assists in 75 games this past season. That’s a perfectly fine year for a complementary winger and a genuinely underwhelming one for a $6.5 million cap hit that was supposed to be more than complementary.
ESPN reported that Kreider wants to play closer to the East Coast, which, fair enough at 35. But the more damning detail is what happened when Anaheim actually tried to trade him instead of just cutting him loose. Anaheim shopped him around the league and came back with nothing it liked without attaching sweeteners to offset the money. The rest of the league looked at a 35-year-old winger still owed real money and passed.
Call the waivers route mutual if that makes everyone feel better about it.
It reads more like the Ducks quietly admitting Kreider was a mistake and hoping the Gauthier deal gets done fast enough that everyone forgets to ask.
That $6.5 million, the final season of the seven-year extension he originally signed with the Rangers back in 2020, now goes toward locking up Gauthier instead. He’s 22, he scored 41 goals last season, and he’s still sitting there unsigned. Daily Faceoff has his asking price climbing into the $15 to $16 million range after Leo Carlsson’s offer-sheet fight pushed his own number to $18 million a year, and this move, combined with the rest of Anaheim’s offseason roster moves, gets the Ducks somewhere around $16 million closer to affording it.
Compare that to how the league handled Ovechkin’s own quiet re-signing this summer. Some franchises find a way to keep an aging winger around without a public unwinding.
The Ducks didn’t even try that hard.
Friedman had the receipts first:
https://twitter.com/PuckReportNHL/status/2097717097279180826
None of this means Kreider’s cooked, to be fair. A contender closer to home probably calls by the weekend, and if some East Coast team overpays for a name it remembers from deep playoff runs, Anaheim ends up looking smart for eating this instead of holding out for a mid-round pick in a trade that never came together anyway.
But that’s a problem for whichever team signs him next. Right now the Ducks just told the whole league what a 22-goal winger with size is worth to them, and it’s less than the paperwork required to move him. Check the rest of our NHL coverage once Gauthier’s number actually lands, because that fight is coming next, and it’s the one Anaheim actually wants to win.
