A quarter of the season down and the Rangers are essentially as projected: a flawed bubble team capable of capturing an eighth consecutive playoff but unlikely to end the franchise’s 23-year Stanley Cup drought.
The downward progression for this group is stark in the wake of the trip to the 2014 final and of finishing with the NHL’s best record a year later. The Blueshirts rank 16th in five-on-five goals scored, after finishing seventh in that category a year ago, third in 2015-16 and first in 2014-15. They are 25th in five-on-five goals-against after finishing 18th last year and seventh two years ago. They are 24th in five-on-five GF/GA percentage after finishing 12th last season and third in the league each of the previous two years.
But this does not appear to be an especially strong league or conference. Of course not. The toll of the punishing cap combined with the expansion draft that produced a stronger club in Vegas at the expense of the other 30 teams whose fans had paid their dues for years has created the lowest-common denominator NHL envisioned for years by Sixth Avenue.
So you watch the Rangers every night, pick apart every flaw, and inevitably reach the no-brainer conclusion that a Cup is out of the question and that pending free agents Rick Nash, Michael Grabner and Nick Holden must be bartered for futures while potential 2019 UFA’s Ryan McDonagh and Mats Zuccarello should be aggressively marketed as well.
But then you watch other teams, identify all of their flaws, and you think that if Henrik Lundqvist’s revival holds, the Blueshirts could win a round the way they did last year and then based on the draw, maybe even another one, and then, well, what if Neal Pionk and Filip Chytil are ready to contribute the second half and the club is augmented by adding Joe Thornton as a rental?
But it is not important if that is my thought process or your thought process. It is only important if that is the thought process of general manager Jeff Gorton, who in my opinion faces the diciest challenge approaching the Feb. 26 trade deadline as any Ranger in that position since Neil Smith in 1994.
Because it is going to be on Gorton, with advice if not necessarily consent from hockey department personnel including president Glen Sather and coach Alain Vigneault — but most certainly with both advice and consent from Garden chairman Jim Dolan — to make the call between taking a rather far-fetched run at a title with many of the same guys who have come close before or to divest and kick the can down the road by investing in a future that is always more uncertain in practice than presented in theory.
Everyone knows the history here, from Emile Francis dealing Curt Bennett, Syl Apps, Jr., Don Luce and Mike Murphy (the second time) for immediate help to Sather and then Gorton wheeling a succession of first-rounders and high picks to go for it all. The temptation when as close as the clubs of the early ’70s and through this decade were is understandable.
Wrong deals, maybe, but for the right reasons. It is not that yielding a pair of seconds and a prospect for Eric Staal in 2016 was necessarily misguided, it was that the Blueshirts didn’t know what to do with him when he got here. It is not that sending away Anthony Duclair and a handful of first-rounders was more ill-advised than dealing Doug Weight, Tony Amonte and Todd Marchant, it is that the 1994 team won in the wake of a series of dramatic deadline trades whereas the 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017 clubs fell short.
The Rangers have never quite been in this position before as a bubble team with pending free agents whose value to the team on the ice may be outweighed by their value on the market. Could the Rangers get a first-plus for Nash, and if the first is in the lower third of the order, is that enough for one of the team’s best two or three forwards? Could the Rangers wheedle a first (or a high second) for Grabner?
The bounty, though and of course, could be expected in the return for McDonagh, who is eligible to go free in 2019 and who will command seven years for between $45 and 50 million on his next deal. This is a legit, blue chip top-pair defenseman whose acquisition would immediately vault the Maple Leafs and Lightning into prime position.
If Gorton could create a bidding war between the clubs that appear the East’s elite, perhaps the Rangers could come back with Mitch Marner from Toronto or perhaps Mikhail Sergachev from Tampa Bay in exchange for the player who for a half-decade has been the Rangers’ most important athlete other than Lundqvist and who still would have another year and another playoff remaining on his contract.
Of course, trading McDonagh would represent as dramatic a course correction as possible and all but eliminate any chance the 2017-18 Rangers have of winning anything, including a playoff berth. It would represent Gorton saying in so many words, wait ’til next year, with next year no more of a guarantee than 75 of the last 76 seasons.