Strome: Kreider 'steered the ship' on move to Ducks
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While Chris Kreider appeared destined for a split with the New York Rangers this off-season, reunited teammate Ryan Strome says he "steered the ship a little bit" en route to being traded to the Anaheim Ducks.
Kreider's Rangers tenure came to an end in June after 13 seasons with the team - a run that included two division titles and Presidents’ Trophies in 2015 and 2024, as well as a Stanley Cup Final appearance in 2014. He waived his 15-team no-trade list to complete the move to Anaheim.
“He’s a very proud Ranger and one of the most accomplished Rangers in history,” Strome told Peter Baugh of The Athletic. “As much as I feel like he needed a bit of a fresh start and a new challenge, I also think it was probably not the easiest thing to go. … When you’re dealing with a player of that pedigree and I think (with) the way some of the other exits of the Rangers’ veterans in the previous years have gone, they wanted to let Chris handle it the way he wanted to handle it. I think he kind of steered the ship a little bit.”
Larry Brooks of the New York Post reported while the trade was in the works that general manager Chris Drury had informed veteran players on the Rangers of his plans to move Kreider in the off-season. He also explored trading the winger in-season before eventually sending team captain Jacob Trouba to the Ducks.
Kreider, 34, had 22 goals and 30 points in 68 games with the Rangers last season.
The 6-foot-3 winger is entering the sixth season of a seven-year, $45 million deal with an annual cap hit of $6.5 million. He is scheduled to become an unrestricted free agent at the end of the 2026-27 campaign.
Anaheim sent 2023 second-round pick Carey Terrance back to the Rangers in the deal, a move that has headlined an off-season of change for the Ducks. The team hired Joel Quenneville as their new head coach in the weeks before the Kreider trade, tasking him with ending a seven-year playoff drought.
In the month-plus since the Kreider trade, Anaheim has made several more moves, sending forward Trevor Zegras to the Philadelphia Flyers for forward Ryan Poehling, and second- and fourth-round picks in June and trading veteran goaltender John Gibson to the Red Wings for Petr Mrazek, receiving another two draft picks as well.
The Ducks added to their top-six on July 1, signing Mikael Granlund to a three-year, $21 million contract. The team also locked up a key piece of the future, inking goaltender Lukas Dostal to a five-year, $32.5 million contract last week. One last major order of business remains for the Ducks with centre Mason McTavish still in need of a new deal as a restricted free agent.
For Kreider, the change from the east coast to the west hasn't fully set in yet. He'll play his first game for a club that isn't the Rangers on Oct. 9 when the Ducks open their season against the Seattle Kraken.
“For me it’s been kind of gradual, which I think is nice,” he told The Athletic. “I don’t know; I have nothing to compare it to.
“There are brush points where it’s kind of like ‘this is happening, for sure.’ (After Anaheim) shipped out my new equipment, jumping on the ice with Ducks stuff on, and people coming up to me and being like ‘you look weird.’”