Why this Rangers’ trade throw-in might stick around a while

There were not a lot of people who thought Vladislav Namestnikov would still be a Ranger at this point, but he’s likely to be a Ranger through this year of rebuilding.

The 25-year-old forward came to the Blueshirts as an add-on to the trade last February that sent Ryan McDonagh and J.T. Miller to the Lightning. He had been in the midst of a career year with Tampa, having skated alongside two of the best in the league in Steven Stamkos and Nikita Kucherov while compiling 20 goals and 44 points in the first 62 games.

Yet when he was dealt, he wasn’t the same player for the Rangers, who were operating with a skeleton roster after selling off most of their veteran assets. He put up just two goals and four points in 19 games, and his future on Broadway looked bleak.

But whether there was a market this summer to flip him or not — likely the latter — Rangers general manager Jeff Gorton decided to sign the restricted free agent to a two-year, $8 million deal.

That makes it more than probable he will stay with the Blueshirts throughout this first year under new coach David Quinn, with rental suitors not too interested in a player locked up for a second year. There is the off chance he could raise his stock to the point where he would be that coveted, but the early returns this season were meager through the Blueshirts’ 1-4-0 getaway going into Tuesday night’s Garden match against the Avalanche.

“I’m still working on my game,” Namestnikov said. “I’m trying to do the little things right, from there. Confidence builds, and I’ll get better.”

Asked if he thought he has gotten better through the first five games, as he had his strongest performance in Saturday’s 2-1 defeat to the Oilers, and the 6-foot, 185-pound Russian said, “I think so, yeah.

“But I know still what I need to do. I’m going to keep working hard. Success comes through hard work, I guess.”

The way Quinn has described it, his forward corps as a whole needs to show more consistent effort in terms of playing with an edge — and that fully includes offensively, where the coach wants players to get to the front of the net more often. Despite Quinn’s insistence on that, it so far has been more of the perimeter-oriented game that defined the latter years of Alain Vigneault’s tenure behind the bench.

“We have to do a better job of creating offense at this level,” Quinn said “Skill is obviously a component of creating offense at this level, but you’ve got to have a grit to your offensive game, you’ve got to have will to your offensive game, and you’ve got to have it for 60 minutes. You can’t have it every now and then.

“If you pass up 10 chances to go to the net, I guarantee if you go to the net 10 straight chances, something good is going to come from it. A goal might come from it. A goal will come from it. That’s something we need to be better at.”

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Through the first week of the season, the aspiration from Quinn was to get things together defensively. The team had been turning over the puck with frightening regularity, and it resulted in constant waves of odd-man rushes against.

They were finally able to play a relatively tight game this past Saturday afternoon, especially impressive against Connor McDavid — who did set up his team’s first goal and then score the game-winner, but was pretty much under wraps besides that. Yet the Rangers couldn’t do that and still create the necessary offense.

“I thought we lost a little of our aggressiveness offensively because we had been harping on not giving up unnecessary odd-man rushes, the 2-on-1’s,” Quinn had said. “I thought we lost a little bit of our puck pursuit off of that.”

The hope was that Namestnikov, for one, could help in showing some of that offensive aggression. It’s probable he is going to stay through this trade deadline, when Gorton is again likely to sell off expiring contracts — such as Kevin Hayes and Mats Zuccarello. So the sooner Namestnikov can turn it around, the better.

“I just have to keep skating,” he said. “I think that’s my biggest asset, my speed. I just have to go in those dirty areas, get the pucks and go from there.”