In the 2000 NHL Entry Draft, the Rangers struck it rich in the 7th round when they chose Swedish goaltender Henrik Lundqvist. Now, they’re returning the favor.

Kudos to New York Daily News writer John Dellapina, who broke the story earlier today that the New York Rangers have reached an agreement with Lundqvist on a contract extension. Scheduled to be a restricted free agent after this season following his decision to sign a one-year deal last summer that allowed the team to pursue free agents Scott Gomez and Chris Drury, Lundqvist is now apparently going to be making slightly more than $6 million dollars a season for the next six years.

Kudos also needs to be given, in this instance at least, to the team’s general manager, Glen Sather. For all the talk about trade deadline rumors and what the team’s future holds next season in regards to some of the top players on the team, Sather correctly realized that the most important aspect of this team’s future is the man minding the nets.

In Henrik Lundqvist, the Rangers have one of the best goaltenders in the National Hockey League and at only 25 years of age; Lundqvist should remain one of the NHL’s elite goalies for at least a decade. This is a goaltender that, in his first two NHL seasons, was nominated for the award given to the player best at the position he plays, the Vezina trophy. Oh yeah, there’s also that little bit about leading Sweden to an Olympic gold medal.

Lest Ranger fans forget, for all of the great contributions made by the likes of Jaromir Jagr and Brendan Shanahan and others to this team since the lockout, the biggest reason the Rangers were able to return to respectability is because they’ve had Lundqvist between the pipes.

It’s certainly fair to criticize the deals that were given to both Gomez and Drury. Even though both are playing well at the moment (better than they did at the start of the season, at least), in the salary cap era, tying up so much salary cap space to two players might hurt the team’s roster flexibility over the next few years. However, the same criticism can not be applied to the deal given to “King Henrik.”

Ranger fans shouldn’t find it too hard to remember how uncomfortable the team’s situation in goal had been for the years between the “Mike Richter era” and the “Lundqvist era.” Those last few seasons of Richter’s career, when injuries were taking their toll, were some difficult times in net for the Broadway Blueshirts. Recall names like Guy Hebert, Kirk McLean, Mike Dunham, Jason LaBarbera, or even the unfortunate case of young Dan Blackburn. Blackburn likely had the potential to be a solid NHL goalie but was thrust into the wrong situation at way too early a time and suffered an unlucky injury that ended his professional hockey career before it really had the chance to begin.

That’s not to say that all of those guys or the various other goalies that had brief stints with the Rangers in the few seasons before the lockout were bad. No, some of them performed admirably, playing behind some pretty terrible teams, while others didn’t do so great. None of them, though, were serious long-term solutions, Blackburn aside. None of them were as good as fast as Henrik Lundqvist, either.

Lundqvist has had goals against averages of 2.24 and 2.34 in his first two seasons, while winning at least 30 games in both. He’s well on his way to having similar numbers this year. Is Lundqvist perfect? No, of course not. In each of his three NHL seasons, counting this one, he has had consistency problems. That’s not enough of an issue to discount his role in this team’s future, though.

This was priority number one for Glen Sather, just as it should have been. If he makes no moves for the rest of the season, he’s still got a coup in this deal. Nothing could have been worse for this team than finding out this off-season that Lundqvist had been signed to an offer sheet by another team after what happened to the Buffalo Sabres with Thomas Vanek last summer.

At least there’s one less thing to worry about in July.