Rangers' troubles are deeper than their pockets
January 8, 2003 Print it
Jay Greenberg
For the Sporting News
After years of going around throwing coins at practically any player who would take them, the Rangers last summer signed the squarest peg on the board.
If Bobby Holik, one of the most competitive players in the NHL, wasn't an overdue fit for a team that had been too easy to play for and, more tellingly, too easy to play against, then general manager Glen Sather is the monkey's uncle, and fans six seasons removed from a playoff game at Madison Square Garden should cry out in submission.
Signing Holik for $45 million over five years was an unprecedented sum for a center who never had scored 30 goals or had 70 points. But Holik, a 6-4, 225-pound, two-time Cup winner and ultimate antidote for the opposition's biggest and/or best center, was supposed to be just what the doctor ordered.
Instead, the Rangers had to order the doctor when Holik reported to camp in what Sather says was disappointing physical condition, then suffered a groin problem that sidelined him for 18 games. Putting on that Blueshirt had turned Holik into Alexandre Daigle, just as it once had turned Mike Keane and Brian Skrudland, two respected bulls, into lost sheep.
Why does that always happen to the Rangers? Big money? Bright lights? Mean media? What keeps the franchise swirling down the toilet along with all the money it has thrown at players? Since last making the playoffs, in 1997, the Rangers have had either the highest or second-highest payroll in the NHL. This year, the best bang for their 69 million bucks seemingly would come from a shot that would put them out of another season of misery.
Joe Micheletti, an analyst on Islanders broadcasts and a former NHL player, says injuries to Pavel Bure and Brian Leetch are partially to blame for the team's current woes, "but the Rangers had the same problems when those players were in there."
"Their highs and lows are so dramatic, there is just too much there (to justify) those kinds of lows," he says. "When they are totally outworked and their best players become unnoticeable, that's not the fault of the G.M. and coach. That's players not taking responsibility."
This season the Rangers are responsible for paying Bure $10 million, Leetch $9.6 million, Holik $9.6 million, Petr Nedved $4.8 million, Darius Kasparaitis $4.1 million, Mike Richter $4 million, Mark Messier $3.9 million, Vladimir Malakhov $3.6 million and Eric Lindros $2.7 million, which could quadruple with attainable games-played bonuses. Even fourth-liner Sandy McCarthy ($1.3 million) and spare part David Karpa ($1.7 million) make more than $1 million.
With the exception of Leetch, all those players were brought in or re-signed by Sather, who once waved Edmonton's small-market banner for fiscal sanity. He now appears to be rolling in dough with a half-baked plan, trying to build a champion in a New York minute.
"No, he didn't get suddenly stupid when he went across the border," Micheletti says. "It only indicates there is a long way to go to building a base up."
And that is the root of the evil the Rangers have wrought upon NHL coffers: The Bagman Franchise hasn't developed enough of its own players, forcing the Red Wings, Stars, Avalanche, Blues and Flyers to pay increasing dollars to keep their best while the Rangers continue to prove you can't buy contention.
Holik says the Rangers' chemistry, which he observed from afar while playing for the Devils, is worse than he thought. Players weren't able to grow up with the team, coming to the Rangers later in their careers with families and other obligations. And opportunities to build camaraderie are further limited because the team is based in the low-travel East. Bure and Lindros are largely loners. Mark Messier, 41, whose leadership skills helped slay a 54-year-old dragon when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup in 1994, no longer can justify the minutes he is being given.
So a team that has three players -- Leetch, Richter and Messier -- with any recollection of success in New York, cycles its own failure better than the puck.
Panthers coach Mike Keenan, who overcame some of those inherent problems in coaching the Rangers to that 1994 Cup win, says his former team will make a run at the playoffs when Bure (knee) and Leetch (ankle) return in February.
Sather agrees but refuses to add himself to the list of the wounded, even if it appears that the man who built the greatest offensive machine in NHL history in Edmonton, then changed with the times and reassembled a fast, if starless, playoff team on a shoestring, suffered a bruised brain falling off the turnip truck.
That must have been where Sather found a head coach, Bryan Trottier, who never had run a bench, who plays Messier more than 18 minutes a game, who leveled a withering public criticism of underachieving winger Radek Dvorak ("He's scared") and criticized Bure's defensive indifference when Bure was one of the team's few plus players. Trottier, who also benched Lindros for taking penalties that looked a lot less stupid than the calls, is feeling his way, although not very well.
"The ice time doesn't make any sense," one NHL coach says. "Trottier should use Mark like Detroit uses (42-year-old) Igor Larionov, 12-13 minutes a game, and lean on Holik more. But Bryan has never done this before. So how would he know?"
Sather's critics contend he is determined to run prospects out of town, refusing to acknowledge the dust bowl he inherited in 2000 from his predecessor, Neil Smith. Sather says he was handcuffed by having players -- Theo Fleury, Val Kamensky, Adam Graves, Sylvain Lefebvre -- with $8 million to $10 million left on their contracts that no one would take.
"But I knew that going in," he says. "The plan all along has been to develop guys while trying to put together a playoff team. "We're buying time."
No pun intended. And no sale to Smith's media friends, never mind how little Sather actually has risked in deals. For Lindros, a player who has considerable health concerns, Sather traded winger Pavel Brendl, a fourth overall pick in 1999 who can't crack the Flyers' lineup; Jan Hlavac, a winger who has been subsequently moved twice; a third-round pick in 2003; and defenseman Kim Johnsson, who has been a nice fit for the Flyers but hardly a high price to pay for a star.
The jury still is out on the Bure deal, but the short-term cost was low. Bure, the game's most dynamic goal scorer, was acquired with a second-round pick (Lee Falardeau) for a spare defenseman (Igor Ulanov) and a B prospect (Filip Novak), plus a 2002 second-rounder (Rob Globke), a first-round pick the Panthers dealt to the Flames (who took Eric Nystrom) and a fourth-rounder in 2003.
Sather erred by not re-signing Martin Rucinsky, a journeyman who complemented Bure and Lindros after replacing Mike York, who was traded to the Oilers for Tom Poti, 26. York, 25, undersized at 185 pounds, had run out of gas after dynamic first halves in all three of his Ranger seasons, and was moved for a young, 6-3 defenseman with offensive skills, if also a tendency for coverage mistakes.
Another prospect, defenseman Tomas Kloucek, 22, was sent to the Predators in December for goalie Mike Dunham when Richter was sidelined for the rest of the season with post-concussion syndrome. Kloucek had lost most of his aggressiveness after tearing an ACL and was bumped by an improved Dale Purinton.
Forward Jamie Lundmark, the ninth overall pick in 1999 and the lone survivor of Smith's prized prospects, is playing for the Rangers, as is goalie Dan Blackburn, Sather's first pick in 2001. The team hasn't gotten better, but it's not because it has gotten older.
Sather has tried to add gumption, in one case by overpaying for Kasparaitis, in others by making low-risk moves for McCarthy, Matthew Barnaby, Mikael Samuelsson and Ronald Petrovicky. But the Rangers' essential problem is that those players are all fourth-liners. Beyond Holik, who is coming on slowly, the team lacks grinders good enough to play on the top three lines.
The Rangers always will be able to afford stars who are unrestricted free agents. But bedrock players remain largely unattainable until the age of 31, when they could become unrestricted free agents and close to the point when their energy begins to ebb.
And when a restricted free agent (with compensation) occasionally forces his way out, as Michael Peca did from the Sabres, the Rangers have little to offer teams who want affordable, young, promising players in return.
"How many draft picks can you trade and remain competitive?" Sather asks. "It's a complicated answer, but the only (young player) I was reluctant to trade was Johnsson, who we could afford because of the (Fedor) Tutin kid we drafted (second round, 2001).
"I want the same kind of team we had in Edmonton. Aggressive, with good speed, that doesn't throw the puck away blindly under pressure like we do now. Garth Murray may be that good second- or third-line player you are talking about, but it just doesn't happen overnight. I really am having to do it backward here."
Such is the deep hole in the bottomless pockets of the Rangers, one that can't be darned with all the money in the Cablevision empire.
"Free agency usually works best with one or two signings around a base of home-grown players," Capitals general manager George McPhee says.
Glen Sather knows. Believe him, he knows.
AI
