THE organizational plan, says Neil Smith, remains the same, with Pavel Bure or without Pavel Bure, with a 50-goal scorer, without a 50-goal scorer. Unfortunately, with this general manager, who has made the bed that Madison Square Garden has become on sleepy Ranger nights, or the next GM who will have to sleep in it.
The Rangers are not even a .500 team for the same reason one of the very best and most exciting players in the NHL will be in a Panthers’ uniform here tomorrow night. The Rangers don’t have enough young players who can turn on a crowd, turn on an opposition GM who is forced to trade a superstar, turn around a franchise that may have to go years before another opportunity knocks like this.
There will be other serious bids from more serious Cup contenders than the Rangers for Theo Fleury and Mark Recchi, who are older than Bure and not nearly as good, besides. The Avalanche, moving into a new arena, would match any offer sheet signed by Peter Forsberg, just like they did Joe Sakic’s and really, can any team so short of young talent as the Rangers afford to give up five No. 1 picks?
It is doubtful Gary Bettman will let the Pittsburgh franchise be devalued to nothing with a sell-off of Jaromir Jagr. Also, unlikely that anybody the Rangers aim their dollar cannons at, will come with less baggage than Bure, who had his reasons for wanting out of Vancouver, and desired badly to come to New York.
Bure really was the best shot on the foreseeable horizon for the Rangers, but Smith didn’t believe he could afford to add Manny Malhotra to a package of Niklas Sundstrom, Dan Cloutier and a No. 1 pick. If the Ranger GM couldn’t, it was not because of the self-restraint he expects us to respect, if not out-and-out applaud, but because of his own mistakes made over the last four years. Smith’s incomprehensible inability to see that size, speed and aggressiveness are the highest priorities in team building, left him unable to make this deal.
Never mind the trades Smith has made since winning the Cup, some good, some bad, some inconsequential. Lately, they’ve been better, indicating either the GM is finally doing his homework, getting more help from his staff, or both. Still, this youth movement is coming late, and more slowly than the Rangers believe, or would have you believe.
Who are all these young players that Smith keeps talking about? Christian Dube? Jeff Brown? Daniel Goneau? From the 1994, 1995 and 1996 drafts, only Cloutier and Marc Savard have turned out to be, will ever turn out to be, regular NHL players. Consistently, the Rangers have rated skill above grit in making selections at points of drafts where the blue-chip players are long gone.
So what else did the Rangers, really, have to offer to sweeten a pot, as long as they were going to make Malhotra, projected to be a solid third-line player, an touchable? Why would Vancouver GM Brian Burke even get back to Smith after Smith insisted Malhotra was a deal-breaker? Hoping that the Rangers would offer Mike Knuble? Savard? Scott Fraser?
The Canucks believed their most pressing needs were for a defenseman and a center, not a checking winger like Sundstrom, not a goalie like Dan Cloutier. If Malhotra couldn’t be part of the deal, then the best of Vancouver’s limited options probably was with Florida, no matter how much better Cloutier turns out to be than Kevin Weekes, if he turns out to be better at all.
The Panthers’ offer wasn’t great, just, for the Canucks’ purposes, a little better than the Rangers, who couldn’t raise it without risking just another of the kind of trade that has won them one Cup in 58 years.
Now, we’re supposed to congratulate Smith for holding firm, keeping his eye on some light at the end of the tunnel, when his mistakes have turned out the lights? All we see so far of this youth movement that could last through the upcoming expansion drafts is Todd Harvey, a winger who can’t stay on the ice, a goalie who has played 12 games, and an 18-year-old center who gets three or four shifts a contest.
Malhotra needs to be playing real games, not just practicing and observing from the bench. If the kid is not ready for the NHL, then get him out of here. It isn’t like he put up Eric Lindros numbers last year in the OHL, that he has totally outgrown junior hockey that he still can’t grow through the competition there.
Then again, the Rangers haven’t had too many young players, so maybe they don’t know how to nurture them. They obviously don’t know how to rate them, which is what is scary about making a checking center a deal-breaker when there was a chance to acquire a superstar.
We would have shot the wad, because Bure is young and would have lit up the Garden for a lot of years. But that’s not to say that Smith necessarily made the wrong call, provided the reason he made it was out of a sense of conviction more than the fear of making another mistake.
Only he can really answer to that, and only he should have to answer to the real reason why Bure is not a Ranger. Which is that despite Neil Smith’s belief through the negotiations that Brian Burke was boxed, so were the Rangers by years of bad decisions.