Rangers GM Glen Sather should be more concerned with filling holes than making headlines.
Assuming Glen Sather is still running the New York Rangers next season, he might want to find a bona fide No. 1-line player or two for his team.
Currently, the Rangers have none; good team, but no star forwards or defencemen.
Outside of goalie Henrik Lundqvist -- the only reason New York is even in a Game 7 in the first round against the Washington Capitals -- the Rangers do not have a single established player they can claim to be a front-liner.
Not Scott Gomez. Not Chris Drury. Not Markus Naslund.
Two solid second-liners on a good team and a guy who scores on occasion, but rarely stands out in a game that matters. With the opportunity to advance to the second round by beating Washington Sunday, the Rangers had no skaters prepared or even capable of competing with the Capitals and for the second game in a row, Lundqvist was unable to pull a rabbit out of his hat.
All the talk was about Sean Avery being back in the lineup after being sent to his room for a timeout by coach John Tortorella, who himself was given a timeout by the NHL (a luxury box all to himself) for a little meltdown of his own in Game 5. He was replaced behind the bench by Jim "Have another Donut" Schoenfeld. What a soap opera!
And yet there was a game to be played. And by the time the Rangers outscored the Capitals 2-0 in the third period, the game was already in the bag with Washington in full control.
Funny thing is, the Rangers could actually win Game 7 and advance to the second round of the playoffs, in which case I'm certain I'll get fried by their fans writing in to comment at the bottom of this story. Regardless, I don't see the Rangers as a team that will seriously challenge for the Eastern Conference championship and the right to play in the Stanley Cup final. Do you?
All of which gets me back to my original point -- the Rangers desperately need true top-line talent.
Sather likes to make a splash when it comes to grabbing headlines. It seems to be the fuel that runs his engine. When Gomez and Drury became available as unrestricted free agents, he snatched them up like they were the winning lottery tickets. The only thing is, they were secondary prizes: good players and Stanley Cup-winners both of them, but not leaders. They are both vastly overpaid and when they did win Stanley Cups, they were support staff and not the driving force on their respective championship teams.
Gomez has two Cup rings and in the 47 playoff games he participated in those seasons, he had seven goals and 22 points. Does that sound like the kind of guy you want leading your team toward the parade route?
Drury, on the other hand, had a really good playoffs in 2000-01 when Colorado beat New Jersey in the final, scoring 11 goals and 16 points, and even had an 18-points-in-18-games yahoo-playoff with the Buffalo Sabres before joining the Rangers. But he tends to skip into the background for long periods of time. With New York he has mostly been a how-much-does-this-player-earn-again kind of guy. Tries hard, but the results are just not there.
Naslund is on the down side of a pretty good career, but he is more miss than hit these days. And don't even get me started on Nikolai Zherdev. He has talent, no question about that, but lacks the drive required to lead a team.
The Rangers' best young player is Marc Staal -- pretty much a defensive defenceman who has the ability to pop the occasional goal, but spends the majority of his time keeping the opposition off the scoresheet. A sophomore, Staal has shown signs of being the kingpin on this hockey team and he even scored Sunday, but he needs scoring support to be at his most effective.
And scoring goals is not exactly the Rangers’ forte. In the first five games of the series they were outscored 11-7, but held a 3-2 lead in games. Thank you Henrik Lundqvist.
It is too late for the Rangers to do anything about their shortcomings now, but Sather had better be more concerned about finding goal-scorers than earning headlines this summer. Signing the likes of Gomez, Drury and Naslund all seemed like good ideas at the time, but how is it working at the most critical time of the season?
