Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

The signings of Marcus Johansson and Mikkel Boedker seemed to signal that better-publicized cases of Nazem Kadri and Alex Pietrangelo would be wrapped up due to their players' acquiescence to the demands of their teams.

This of course ignores how much better the latter two players have been in their time in the world's best hockey league than the former; but largely lost in all this is the fact that Derek Stepan, too, remains unsigned in New York and seems likely to get shorted by Glen Sather if he wants a contract at all, which one would assume he does.

If anything, Stepan is and should be a more interesting case than Kadri, due to the much longer history of success in the league (three full seasons, 0.66 points per game in 212 career appearances).

Not that Pietrangelo has anything to show anyone a thing about his game, in the way that critics have some sort of point in implying Kadri does, but that applies to Stepan, too. He had 51 points as a 21-year-old sophomore in 2011-12, and followed that up with an identical-to-Kadri 18 goals and 44 points in the shortened season. Just as Dave Nonis is getting rightly roasted for signing everyone before his promising young center, so too should Sather be receiving the same criticism.

The Rangers have, as of this moment, $2.1 million in cap space, and even the most cynical wag — wryly observing that Stepan has been largely sheltered in his career to this point, getting favorable zone starts against mostly soft competition and, to his credit, destroying it — can't say with a straight face that this is the kind of money a player of Stepan's caliber should even consider taking. You'd have to think that he lines up as the Rangers' No. 2 center, and that the team could ill afford to go without him for any period of time, given that with their new coach they likely have aspirations of, you know, making the playoffs and being good this season and so on.

Unless you're deeply invested in contorting your argument to an absurd position, there is no question as to what Stepan deserves, at least within an acceptable range, because his value is apparent. The issue, though, is that the Rangers obviously don't have the ability to give him that much.

Should they have used an amnesty buyout Brad Richards or, say, Arron Asham or Darroll Powe to give themselves a little more wiggle room? You can probably make the case that they should have, given their not having done so is the reason they cannot re-sign a 23-year-old kid who went nearly a point-a-game last year.

So what is, or at least should be, the question, then? It seems to me that it should be about how this isn't getting more publicity. In an Olympic year, a young kid who looks like a pretty good bet to make the American team might start the season without a team.

Another rather germane question, one raised by several people in the last few days, is why no one has offer-sheeted Stepan.

Tyler Dellow floated the particularly intriguing idea of the Islanders doing so, because what do they really have to lose by inking him long-term to a deal in the neighborhood of, say, $5 million? A Tavares/Stepan 1-2 setup down the middle for the next five years or so seems rather conducive to repeated playoff appearances, does it not?

That, of course, will never happen because that's simply not how the NHL works, but obviously something has to give here. Unlike Nonis, Sather did not shell out like a drunken and already-spendthrift sailor on mediocre parts. The guys he re-signed or brought aboard, are useful and still a good value despite their cost (Ryan McDonagh) or useful and cheap at the very least (Benoit Pouliot).

This is, really, a case of the Rangers being victimized by the cap coming down, by a wholly arbitrary amount, but if you're making a choice between Pouliot and Stepan that's not a choice at all. It comes down to having the ability to clean up your own house before you start bringing new things into it, and while Pouliot is a perfectly fine depth player that can help a team win, Stepan is a future centerpiece for the Rangers. This is about priorities (which Sather has gotten all out of order) and managing moving parts (which he simply hasn't done).