Neil Keefe

Mar 17, 2010

Rangers Running Out of Time

On Tuesday, there were several possibilities for how the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings would look at the end of the night. The Rangers were in a position to take over possession of the

On Tuesday, there were several possibilities for how the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings would look at the end of the night. The Rangers were in a position to take over possession of the eighth and final spot in the East (a k a the chance to lose to the Capitals in the first round), and also in a position to lose more ground on the Flyers, Canadiens and Bruins.

With Rangers-Canadiens, Bruins-Hurricanes, Flyers-Predators all on the same night, I envisioned the opportunity to start this story off by saying, “So you’re telling me there’s a chance?” Just six days after I questioned John Tortorella’s future with the team and compared his Rangers tenure with the men before him, he had a chance to erase the 1,598 words I used to question his job along with Glen Sather’s.

If the Rangers could take care of their own business and get some help from the Hurricanes and Predators, maybe Tortorella could have this team on a run to the playoffs that very few thought was possible. But all that talk of urgency the team spent preaching about during the week ended up just being talk.

On a night when the Rangers could have moved into eighth place and prevented the Canadiens from separating themselves from the pack even more, the Rangers put together one of their worst home performances of the season. But the four-point swing in the standings between the Rangers and Canadiens wasn’t the only bad news for the Blueshirts. It was just the tip of the iceberg.

After the Rangers were able to tie the game at 1, I flipped to the Bruins-Hurricanes game where Carolina had cut into the Boston’s lead and trailed just 2-1. Then I flipped to the Flyers-Predators where Nashville had a commanding 3-1 lead and a goal away from putting that game on ice. Things were quietly falling into place for the Rangers if they could score the next goal. But when the Canadiens took the lead against the Rangers on a garbage deflection of Artem Anisimov’s skate, everything began to fall apart at the same time across the league.

The Rangers lost, the Canadiens won, the Bruins won, the Flyers fought back to earn a point in a shootout loss and Game 70 of the Rangers’ season was used up. Maybe it wasn’t all bad. I guess the Flyers could have gotten two points instead of just one.

Here is what the standings looked like at 7 p.m. on Tuesday night:

6. Flyers, 76 pts
7. Canadiens, 76 pts
8. Bruins, 72 pts
9. Rangers, 71 pts

And here is what the bottom of the East looks like now:

6. Canadiens, 78 pts
7. Flyers, 77 pts
8. Bruins, 74 pts
9. Rangers, 71 pts

The Canadiens tried to give the Rangers the game on Tuesday and so did the refs with timely power-play opportunities handed to the Blueshirts, including man advantages at 11:20 and 19:05 of the third period. But the Rangers wanted no part of their power play, as they went 0-for-5 with the man advantage and recorded a total of two shots on the five chances.

The Rangers had to put a dent into their direct competition, but instead, they ran in place while their competition took off for the finish line. And while saying the right things might sound nice, it really doesn’t matter at this point. All that matters is getting two points at the end of the day, and for a team that talked about playing with a postseason mentality and a do-or-die mindset all week, they couldn’t have played with less desire against a team they are chasing.

“Every game is a Game Seven for us, no matter who we are playing,” Henrik Lundqvist said before Tuesday’s game. And Lundqvist is right. It’s just too bad he is the only one that plays like it. You could make a case for Sean Avery too after his last two games, but it took him nearly the entire season and a recent benching to wake up, and there aren’t enough games left for Tortorella to wake up the rest of the team by making examples of every player.

Lundqvist continues to stand on his head while his anemic offense tries to muster some shots and even sometimes a goal or two. He continues to play outstanding down the stretch, and is always there to field questions after the game whether the team wins or loses. He has yet to pull a Billy Wagner and throw his teammates under the bus for inconsistent play, but King Henrik is only human and at some point, you’d have to think that the last few years of carrying the team on his back will get to him.

No one expected the Rangers to run the table and climb to the top of the Eastern Conference standings, and it’s unfair to think that they will win every game over the final weeks of the season. But you’d like to think they would at least come to play at home against a team they are chasing. Then again, maybe it’s just wishful thinking asking for a team that is under .500 at home to start playing with a purpose in their own building with just four games remaining at MSG.

Is the Rangers’ season over? No. And wins over St. Louis on Thursday and Boston on Sunday will certainly enhance their playoff odds. But what have the Rangers done to make anyone believe in them down the stretch? With two wins in their last seven games and Sean Avery as their offense, the Rangers aren’t exactly deserving of a playoff berth, and maybe that’s for the better. Maybe finishing ninth instead of eighth will keep the Rangers from being dismantled by the Capitals in the first round and save the tri-state area further embarrassment from the Blueshirts.

Chris Drury referred to the Rangers’ losing ways as “immaturity” after being embarrassed by the Canadiens. “That’s what it’s been all year,” Drury said. “Simple answer.”

Hopefully the Rangers will respond to “immaturity” because they didn’t seem to understand “urgency” or “Game Seven” or “postseason mentality” or “do-or-die,” and there isn’t enough time left to try any other motivational phrases.

Blogs • Rangers

Mar 10, 2010

John Tortorella’s Time Could Be Running Out

Type “fire john tortorella” into Google and you will get nothing. Well nothing relevant. Sure, there are “about 17,800” articles that match those keywords, but none of those 17,800 search results suggest that he should no longer be coaching the Rangers. The majority of the results involve the keywords, just not in that order, and instead commend Tortorella’s job as coach and beg for Glen Sather to be fired. That is actually the solution that makes the most sense to improve the Rangers, but at this point it’s unrealistic.

Since Glen Sather took over as general manager of the Rangers in 2000, he has fired four head coaches including himself. He has used the head coaching position as the scapegoat for his managerial mistakes and in turn built a revolving door behind the Blueshirts’ bench. He has spent his time as GM acting without consequences, and why wouldn’t he? If it took James Dolan as long as it did to fire Isiah Thomas, you’d have to think Sather is safe until at least 2020, no matter what product he puts on the ice.

Last February, after winning just twice in 12 games, Tom Renney became the latest casualty of the Glen Sather era, as he was relieved of his coaching duties with the Rangers sitting in sixth place. At the time, it was the only move Sather could make to shake up a club that he had allowed to go stale. He had cornered himself by yet again constructing a roster of overpaid former stars; stars that made names for themselves by achieving success away from New York. Despite proclaiming to get younger, Sather resorted to his old ways of signing aging free agents with their talent in decline, and his poor decisions from the previous summers were exposed as the level of play heightened in the final weeks of the season.

The Rangers were good enough to make the playoffs last season if Renney kept his job, just like they had been the three seasons prior. But in a state of panic, Sather hit the gong on Renney’s tenure in a last-second attempt to wake up an uninspired team that was simply going through the motions. With Sather’s “superstars” underperforming and the team watching their postseason berth slip from their grasp, a 2-7-3 slump was a good enough reason for Sather to pull the trigger on Renney. If Sather refrained from making a coaching switch, it was likely that blame would fall upon him if the Rangers missed the postseason. By putting a fresh face behind the bench, he could direct the media’s attention at the new coach and use the new coach as his newest scapegoat for his own mistakes if things didn’t work out.

On Feb. 23, 2009, Sather fired Renney and brought in John Tortorella, who went 0-3-1 at the helm of the Rangers on an interim basis in 1999-00. Just five years removed from winning the Stanley Cup with Tampa Bay, Sather was bringing a big name to Broadway. He wasn’t giving someone their first NHL coaching job like he did with Bryan Trottier in 2002-03, and he wasn’t rolling the dice with an unknown. He was bringing in a proven coach and someone whose in-your-face style and zero-tolerance policies were the anti-Tom Renney. Sather thought that Tortorella would love being back in New York and that New York would love Tortorella back. So far it hasn’t worked out that way.

Tortorella finished what Renney started by keeping the Rangers in the postseason picture last year. But in the first round, the team let a 3-1 series lead slip away to the heavily favored Capitals, and Tortorella became the focal point of the series after some unruly behavior with Capitals fans. A series that was supposed to be about the play of Henrik Lundqvist and Alexander Ovechkin became centered around the coach who was just over a month into his new job, and it looked like Tortorella and New York weren’t going to the be the match Sather hoped for.

With Tortorella in his first full season as Rangers head coach, the team has been everything it wasn’t when Renney was the coach, and it has been everything it was before Renney became the coach. The team is reminiscent of the inconsistencies that defined the organizations from 1997 until the lockout when the postseason was always just out of reach. Trying to predict which Rangers team will show up on a given night has become as challenging as predicting which Knicks team will show up. And like the Knicks, the “good” Rangers rarely show up two games in a row.

The team has been treading water all season, managing to stay in the thick of things in the playoff race, but really just prolonging their inevitable mathematical elimination, which is now creeping up fast with the recent success of the Flyers, Canadiens and Bruins.

So, my question is this: What has John Tortorella done to this point to remain as head coach of the Rangers?

I am certainly not a believer in changing coaches every season and giving coaches only one season to get their feet under them in a new city. But then again, I don’t decide who coaches the Rangers, and going by the history and the standards of the man (Sather) who does decide, it seems like a fair question.

Sather fired Renney – the Rangers’ winningest coach since Mike Keenan – for going 2-7-3 despite still being in playoff position. Renney had brought the Rangers to the postseason three times in three years and had them in sixth place in his fourth season before he was let go. He coached four Rangers teams that went to the postseason, which happen to be the only four Rangers teams to go to the postseason during the Glen Sather era.

In Tortorella’s first full season with the team, they have been chasing the Top 8 for most of the winter and the last time they had at least a 50 percent chance of earning a spot in the playoffs, according to Coolstandings.com, was Jan. 22 – well over a month ago. The team relies on success from two players – Marian Gaborik and Henrik Lundqvist –and despite outstanding seasons from both, the Rangers are still closer to be in 13th place in the East then they are sixth.

Hope is not yet lost, though it’s getting close. The Flyers, Canadiens and Bruins aren’t losing and even when they do, they don’t in regulation. Seven points separate the Rangers and the Flyers, five points separate the Rangers and the Canadiens and three points separate the Rangers and the Bruins. The Rangers have 16 games remaining and a possible 32 points available for grabs if they were to finish the season with a historical 16 wins in a row.

Since 2000, the lowest point total an eighth seed has gotten into the playoffs with has been 83 (2002-03). At that rate, the Rangers would need to average one point a game the rest of the way, and that certainly won’t be good enough this year considering the teams they are trying to catch are well ahead of that pace and aren’t slowing down.

Maybe John Tortorella’s work isn’t done in New York even though he has done little to nothing to earn another season. There is still a chance he can extend the Rangers’ consecutive postseason appearance streak to five, but time is running out on their ability to control their own fate. Coolstandings.com gives the Rangers a 21.5 percent chance of reaching the postseason entering Wednesday’s game, which is surprisingly up 5.1 percent since the league resumed play after the Olympic break. The odds are against them, but the schedule favors them in that they play Philadelphia three more times, Montreal once and Boston once with a chance to steal points from their direct competition.

During the Knicks-Hawks game the other night, Mike Breen told Clyde Frazier that he wished the Knicks could celebrate the team’s 1969-70 championship every year. Now he probably said it because it was enjoyable to talk to and be around the players and personalities from that memorable team, but he definitely also said it because that season was one of only two winning memories – the other being the 1972-73 championship – that the franchise has to live off of from the last 40 years.

This June will be 16 years since the Rangers’ last Stanley Cup celebration. The team has run out of ways to milk the memories of the 1993-94 team and run out of numbers to retire and players to recognize from the last Cup winner. After it looked like the franchise was headed in the right direction post-lockout, this season has set the Rangers back and erased any confidence Rangers fans had of returning to the finals in the near future.

It doesn’t look like the organization will have any new memories to remember and relive with Glen Sather leading the way, as his time in New York continues to be an epic disaster despite his illustrious career in Edmonton. It might not be John Tortorella’s fault that the Rangers are in the position they’re in, but eventually he will take the fall for the team’s failures, not Sather. The same thing happened to Tortorella’s predecessor and the same thing will happen to his successor.

Blogs • MLB

Mar 5, 2010

The Mets with the Most to Lose

No one knows what to expect from the Mets this season. If everything goes right and they catch a few breaks they could potentially win the division, though the wild card is probably a more

No one knows what to expect from the Mets this season. If everything goes right and they catch a few breaks they could potentially win the division, though the wild card is probably a more realistic goal. But as good of a chance as the Mets have of making the postseason, they have just as good if not better a chance of missing out on the postseason for the fourth year in a row. It’s hard to argue for or against any prediction when it comes to the 2010 Mets because it’s hard to predict success or failure for a club that has erased all expectations.

On Monday, Daniel Murphy told Mike Francesa that the team “is built to win now,” and Omar Minaya looked like the guy from the Miller Lite commercial trying to say “I love you” when he told Francesa that he believes in his team this year. Forget Mets fans, not even the players or management know what to expect this season.

The Mets are at a crossroads after gradually getting worse since their Game 7 defeat against the Cardinals in the 2006 NLCS. If you had told me before Game 7 that the Mets wouldn’t win a single postseason game over the next three years, I wouldn’t have believed you. I don’t think anyone would. As a Yankees fan, I was legitimately scared of the Mets’ rise in 2006 and the idea that they might make a run at being the toast of the town; the same way the Jets did this winter by becoming more relevant than the Giants. But here we are, 31 days away from Opening Day 2010 and the Mets’ last postseason win was against the Cardinals in Game 6 of that NLCS.

The conversation of breaking up “the core” of the Mets has become as much a part of summer as Wiffle ball and lemonade, and Omar Minaya and Jerry Manuel’s job statuses have become day-to-day as this point. Mets fans are at their breaking point if they haven’t already broke, and what has gone on the last three seasons can’t go on any longer … at least not with the same team and front office.

Right now, Mets fans are just happy baseball is back because it gives them actual games to talk about, and there is no longer a need to dwell on last season. But how long that happiness lasts will depend on how well the Mets perform. Stuck in the same city as the World Series champions and in the same division as the National League champions, Mets fans are in a unique position that no other fan base in professional sports can relate to.

The Mets will either return to the postseason this year and buy some much needed time with their fans, or they will extend their October-less streak and the Wilpons will change the look of the team like a dirty diaper, which is what they have become. Some players will stick around even with another losing season in Queens and maybe some front office executives will avoid the ax. But there is definitely more at stake for certain members of the organization than there is for others if the Mets don’t win. Here is what’s at stake for those players and personnel if the Mets lay another egg in 2010.

5. Does that offer in Boston still stand?
Jason Bay is living the high life … for now. He is the new guy in town and everyone wants to rave about his well-mannered personality and delightful clubhouse presence. But it’s also spring training and no one cares if the new guy is hitting the ball out of the park as long he is showing up to the park, isn’t injured and is friendly with the media.

Bay went from Pittsburgh to Boston and went from being “That Canadian guy from the Pirates that we only get to see during the All-Star Game” to being “The guy who made Red Sox fans quickly forget about Manny Ramirez.”

The same traits that Mets fans are using to praise Bay – his nice-guy routine and vanilla personality – will be used as ammunition against him if the team isn’t winning. As bad as the Boston media can be with just one team in town to worry about, Bay has no idea what the New York media and the city’s fans are capable of when things begin to go south.

Bay gave up the opportunity to hit in the middle of the order for a World Series contender to be the new guy on a team that could possibly win its division or be mathematically eliminated in July. He gave up a situation he was already comfortable in and a situation he already experienced success in. Now he will either be responsible for helping bring the Mets back to prominence or for helping extend a dark period in the franchise’s history. If it’s the latter, he will be left to think about “what could have been” in Boston.

4. 36 million regrets
If I’m Omar Minaya or Jerry Manuel and I have one final chance to turn things around, I wouldn’t want Oliver Perez in my rotation. There were other pitchers and more economically sound options for Omar Minaya during the 2009 offseason, but he decided to go all-in on Oliver Perez and ended up with a busted straight.

Perez made $12 million last year. For that amount of money, the Mets could have had Bobby Abreu ($5 million) and Randy Wolf ($5 million) and $2 million left over to split among their season ticket holders as an apology for their 2009 product. Instead, their return on investment was 14 starts from Perez at $857,142.86 per start and 127 base runners in 66 innings.

Perez’s current contract hasn’t been completely Carl Pavano-esque just yet, but it’s on its way. At least the Yankees had competition went they were courting Pavano, and they were actually outbidding other interested teams.

The Mets are still on the hook for two more years and $24 million for Perez, so he isn’t exactly going anywhere. The only place he is going is to the mound every fifth day – if he can stay healthy – and the Mets are going to just have to cross their fingers and hope for the best when he starts. Otherwise, $12 million is a lot to pay a Triple-A starter.

3. The Mets’ Donnie Baseball
David Wright is the core member with the least to lose, and because of that he isn’t grouped with the other two. He is the face of the franchise and he is the player the media looks to for answers, whether that is fair or not.

When Wright had the Mets one game away from the World Series in 2006 at the age of 23, he looked like he might be the centerpiece of the first dynasty on the other side of town. Now four years later, his career is looking to be more like Don Mattingly’s than it is Derek Jeter’s, as Wright is slowly creeping up on 30 and becoming a great player who happened to play on a bunch of bad teams.

Wright is the go-to guy in the clubhouse for the media, and the most popular player on a team whose popularity rivals Governor Patterson’s. He needs to be the leader of the team on the field and off of it more than ever this season. He needs to take control of the team and make it his team now that the veterans he came up with are no longer with the club.

Wright’s home run and RBI totals dropped off drastically in 2009, and that can’t happen again in 2010, even if Citi Field wasn’t built for right-handed power. Mets fans have refrained from turning on No. 5, but now it’s officially “David’s team,” if it wasn’t already, and the success of the team will be directly related with his own performance.

2. Break up the core
I have under June 1 in the “When will the ‘break up the core’ conversation dominate the tri-state area for an entire day” pool. And if it gets to that point, David Wright will be safe, but Jose Reyes and Carlos Beltran won’t be.

It wasn’t too long ago that Mets fans tried to argue Jose Reyes’ abilities against Derek Jeter’s. That debate ended the same way it did for Red Sox fans when they tried to argue Nomar Garciaparra against Derek Jeter. Now Mets fans aren’t worried about Jose Reyes being Derek Jeter, they would be happy if Reyes could just stay in the lineup the whole season.

Reyes’ contract is over at the end of the season with the Mets holding an $11 million club option on him for 2011, which they will most certainly exercise. But after that, it’s anyone’s guess as to what will happen with Reyes. Maybe he will be the pre-2009 Reyes or maybe his best days are behind him. No one can be sure, but coming off an injury-plagued year and already having health problems this season, Reyes has a lot to play for and a lot more to lose if he can’t regain his old form.

Beltran is in a similar situation to Reyes after being injured for a significant amount of time in 2009. Couple that with his recent knee surgery that the Mets may or may not have granted consent for him to undergo, and Beltran is going up against some serious pressure once he returns.

Beltran has more to lose than Reyes because he isn’t homegrown and because he is older. Mets fans love their homegrown talent and they will back them up – regardless of their abilities – until they are no longer a Met. With Beltran turning 33 this season and with just one year left on his contract following this year, the Mets will be more willing to find a new home for Beltran than they will be for the other core members. It’s just a matter of finding out if another home would even want to deal for Beltran.

1. Win or learn how to use Craigslist
Jerry Manuel and Omar Minaya are a package deal, and at this point in their Mets careers, they can’t exist without each other because ownership won’t let them. And ownership shouldn’t let them.

Neither of the two will be looking at the same position with another team ever again if they can’t right the sinking ship in Queens. It either has to work out in New York or it’s back to being a first base coach somewhere for Manuel and back to scouting the bus leagues for Minaya.

Omar doesn’t deserve another chance with another manager, and Mets fans don’t deserve to have Jerry Manuel as their manager unless he can lead the team to the playoffs. Because of this, Mets fans find themselves in a Catch-22. The majority of Mets fans want one or both men replaced, but in order to do so, the Mets would have to miss out on the postseason again. No Mets fan is willing to concede 2010 and live through another season of misery in order to get a new regime, so they are going to have to live with the “M and M” boys for one more season.

Bob Melvin’s recent hiring in the Mets scouting department can’t be good for Manuel’s future and Jerry is certainly aware of this. And since Omar didn’t exactly give a straight answer to Francesa’s question asking if he no longer is making the decisions in the organization, it’s safe to say Omar knows were his fate lies as well. Winning cures everything, and it’s the one thing standing between a happy ending and a horrible breakup for Omar and Jerry in Queens.

Blogs • Rangers

Mar 3, 2010

Deadline Dilemma

There was nothing on Monday to help ease the devastating feeling of Sunday’s gold-medal defeat. On Monday, the Knicks allowed 74 first-half points to the Cavaliers in an eventual 31-point loss … Alex Rodriguez was linked to some sketchy doctor and needed for an FBI investigation … Jay Leno made his Tonight Show comeback in place of Conan O’Brien … Sadly, Jimmy Fallon still had his spot hosting Late Night … and I don’t even watch The Bachelor, but apparently he ruined the season finale by choosing the wrong girl. As if Sidney Crosby finding Ryan Miller’s five-hole seven minutes and 40 seconds into overtime wasn’t bad enough, the events of Monday just poured salt into the wound that Sid the Kid had opened the day before. On Tuesday, however, the gold-medal loss began to hurt a little less.

On Tuesday, the Yankees had their annual team outing, which resembled a 12-year-old’s birthday party, meaning it was the eve of the team’s spring training opener. And the tri-state area hockey teams resumed play after a two-week layoff, going undefeated on the eve of the NHL’s trade deadline.

The Rangers began a stretch of 20 games in 42 days by scoring four goals in a win against the Senators without Marian Gaborik. The Islanders helped improve their chances in the Eastern Conference playoff picture with a 5-3 win over the Blackhawks on the Island. And the Devils held off the West’s best in San Jose with a 4-3 victory against the Sharks.

With Wednesday’s 3 p.m. trade deadline looming, it was the last chance for teams to decide whether they would be buyers or sellers, even though the local teams have pretty much cemented their roles for the rest of the 2009-10 season.

The Devils are built to win now and they know it, as does the entire hockey world. Lou Lamoriello sees a team with several key players in their mid-30s and a franchise goalie who is nearing 40. It’s why he went against his own philosophy and the culture he instituted in New Jersey to acquire Ilya Kovalchuk in a deal that cost him Johnny Oduya, Niclas Bergfors, Patrice Cormier, a first-round pick in 2010 and a second-round pick in 2010. The Devils’ window of opportunity is slowly closing and this year might be one of the last chances the organization has to capitalize on the Brodeur Era. Lamoriello knows what he has and he is going for it all this season, even knowing that Kovalchuk’s time in New Jersey might only last through the team’s last game this season.

The Islanders, on the other hand, are built for the future. With a strong core of John Tavares and Kyle Okposo, the Islanders aren’t about to sacrifice the talented youth they have lacked since the lockout for a 19-game boost that will land them a matchup with the Capitals in the first round. The Islanders have been a pleasant surprise this season with a team of mostly 20-somethings, managing to stay in the thick of things in the playoff race. If the Islanders can find a way into the playoffs, they will have exceeded all expectations and completed an unlikely turnaround after finishing with a league-worst 61 points last year. And if they fall short of the playoffs, no one will be disappointed since they weren’t expected to achieve this much success this season anyways. The Islanders know where they stand in the Eastern Conference and what they will be able to achieve in the near future with their abundance of young talent.

That brings us to the Rangers. They aren’t really ready to win now, and they aren’t built for the future and don’t appear to be building for the future. They remain in the same spot they have been in for the past five seasons – good enough to make the postseason but not good enough to win in the postseason. There is a good mix of young and old on the Rangers, but to say the Rangers are a team capable of going the distance, well, it would be wishful thinking. Tuesday’s win over the Senators only added more confusion in the search to find out who the Rangers are, because no one – Glen Sather included – knows what to expect from the Rangers or when to expect to it.

Right now the Rangers are either …

Team A: A team that has won three straight, is peaking at the right time and is primed for the stretch run after finally realizing its potential after five months of inconsistent play.

Or …

Team B: A team that has won three straight, but a team that picked the wrong night to play above its head and in turn, only masked its offensive problems.

If the Rangers are “Team A” and have actually found the rhythm that all of New York has waited for them to find, then there is no need to alter the roster or change the team’s current landscape. If Glen Sather thinks that the team he saw smoke the Senators on Tuesday is the team that will come to play for the remainder of the year, then he doesn’t need to tinker with the team’s current makeup.

But if the Rangers are “Team B,” then they picked the wrong night to play like a team built to win this season since there aren’t any games remaining before the deadline for the Blueshirts to show their true colors. Sather needs to know if Tuesday’s win was false hope or a sign of things to come. He needs to know if the Rangers can make a run the rest of the way as currently constructed, and he needs to decide quickly.

Had the Rangers laid an egg in Ottawa and started the stretch run off with a weak effort, it would have been easy to say that without Gaborik the Rangers are a disaster, and it would have made it easy for Sather to make some sort of move on Wednesday to shake up the roster. Instead, the Rangers took it to the Senators without their leading scorer, and no one knows if this team is OK without Gaborik and a contender with him. No one knows whether or not this team should go forward as is, or if change is needed.

In all likelihood, Sather will stand pat at the deadline, and I’m not sure that isn’t the right move. I’m also not sure it is. I’m not really sure what to make of the Rangers’ situation or what to expect of them over the next six weeks. I’m not sure that there is a move that can be made at this point that will take the Rangers to the next level and get them through March and April and beyond. And even if a move of that caliber exists and Sather makes it, there is no guarantee that he will be able to justify it in the postseason since the Rangers are currently on the outside looking in.

If Sather has been able to maintain his position with the Rangers to this point, it’s safe to say that there isn’t a trade he can make or pass up that will cost him his job. There isn’t a level of success the Rangers need to achieve or a playoff round they need to reach for him to remain general manager.

Sather put the Rangers into this awkward position of being a perennial five through eight seed in the Eastern Conference, and it should be on him to get them out of their five-year funk. Just don’t count on it happening by 3 p.m. because at 3:01 p.m., chances are the Rangers won’t be a team built to win now or a team built for the future. They will still just be the same old Rangers. Who that is, I’m not sure?

Blogs • NHL • Team USA

Feb 25, 2010

Heavenly Hockey

Thirty years after the original “Miracle on Ice,” one game separates Team USA and the gold-medal game and a chance at history.

This column was originally published on WFAN.com on Feb. 25, 2010.

If you like hockey, then you liked Wednesday. And even if you don’t like hockey, chances are that you probably watched it at some point on Wednesday because it was on for 11 1/2 straight hours. Hockey had its version of March Madness, and in this case, the Elite Eight. Aside from not being able to watch three of the four games in high definition, it was a perfect day for a hockey fan. It was a day I didn’t want to see end, and on Sunday it will be a tournament that I wish didn’t have to disappear for four years. But if Gary Bettman has his way, the magic of Wednesday won’t ever return.

Between trying to decide if Pierre McGuire’s tenure as a “sideline” reporter between the benches has been a bigger failure than the FoxTrax puck was, and wondering if the over 2 ½ will hit on how many times Eddie Olczyk says “active sticks” during the USA game (it went under, he only said it once), I tried to imagine watching Olympic hockey without NHL players and I couldn’t.

Since allowing NHL players to participate in the Olympics in 1998, the decision has been the only one the game deserves credit for in recent years. Now the league is prepared to tell their fans – the ones they have left – that the Olympics will have to do without NHL players in the future because the league is losing too much money during the two-week layoff.

Gary Bettman isn’t exactly crushing it in approval rating and he is certainly isn’t winning any popularity contests. The same man who has watched two teams relocate from Canada during his tenure as commissioner is now ready to destroy the best thing the game has going for it.

With Bettman at the helm, fighting has been basically taken out of the game thanks to the instigator rule, a trapezoid has been painted behind the net and two-line passing has been allowed. He contemplated changing the size of the net, first allowed goalies to expand the size of their equipment and then created restrictions for them. He permitted the change of the overtime format to 4-on-4 and OK’ed shootouts deciding games and playoff berths. He let the Sabres change their colors to red and black before they changed them back, and then there was that time where the NHL didn’t play for an entire season. If people cared about hockey then Bettman might have to answer for his decisions. But no one cares enough to make a stand because Bettman chased away casual fans, and the only fans remaining are those that would watch the NHL no matter what type of mud Bettman drags it through.

It didn’t have to be like this and it doesn’t have to continue to be like this. I can’t remember the last time people I wouldn’t expect to be excited about hockey were this excited. Team USA’s resurgence, and the overall talent level of the tournament has casual fans finding out that there are other stars in the sport than Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin. Even if those fans missed entire first periods because they were trying to find out what NBC ancillary channel the Olympics relegated hockey to, they have still become attracted to the game. There is a throng of new hockey fans with a desire to watch a sport that can use as many fans as it can get. And the commissioner who has spent the last six-plus years trying to attract new audiences is ready to deprive his newest fans of the reason they watched hockey in the first place.

On Monday I wrote about how Americans were interested in how Team USA would perform in the tournament, and mainly how they would perform against Team Canada. Well, according to the New York Times, the USA-Canada game matched MSNBC’s election-night viewership and was the most-watched sports program in Canadian history. It was a non-elimination game and it had more viewers in both countries than Game 7 of last season’s Stanley Cup final, in which the game’s biggest star was playing against one of the game’s most popular teams.

Did NBC do the NHL – its business partner – an injustice by not airing important preliminary games and even the Canada-Russia quarterfinal on its main station? Yes. If the games were on NBC, more people would have stumbled upon them while looking for The Office or 30 Rock, but the amount of positive exposure the NHL has received during the tournament can’t be rivaled by anything the league has done itself to increase popularity.

Maybe the NHL and the television networks of future Olympics can work out a marketing partnership or the networks can promise to put the intriguing matchups on their No. 1 channel in place of the biathlon or ski jumping or curling. If the NHL is so hung up on trying to make money off the Olympics rather than letting the Olympics work its magic for the NHL, then OK, find a business strategy that works. Just don’t sacrifice the participation of NHL players as that strategy.

The Olympics deserve the best hockey players from each country and that means NHLers. NHL-filled rosters offer an experience for viewers that isn’t duplicated at any other time. Sure, there is the IIHF World Championship each year, but that takes place during the NHL playoffs, so many of the top players aren’t available, and those who are usually decline to play. Amateur lineups would create a tournament similar to the World Junior Championships, and teams like the United States and Canada would be at a disadvantage against the European teams that include former NHL players currently playing in the KHL or European elite leagues.

The uniqueness of the event creates a bond among each country’s fans that rarely happens. The tournament allows for fans of NHL rivals like the Rangers and Devils to pull for each other’s players in the same way Yankees fans are asked to pull for Red Sox, and Mets fans for Phillies with home-field in the World Series on the line at the MLB All-Star Game. There aren’t too many times Rangers fans hope Zach Parise scores a goal and hope Henrik Lundqvist gives one up. For a week, Devils fans are allowed to hate Martin Brodeur and love Chris Drury.

Most importantly, NHL players in the Olympics just makes for better hockey.

Yes, the two-week break and lack of an All-Star Game is costing the NHL money today, but maybe Bettman doesn’t see what this tournament is doing for tomorrow and the future of the game. The Winter Classic is nice, but it’s not doing the trick, and the only thing that could get the game back on the map in the United States would be an American star equivalent in talent to Crosby or Ovechkin. The Olympics are doing a job that Bettman has tried to do since he cancelled the 2004-05 season, and no one cares that there wasn’t an All-Star Game or a skills competition this February. Fans want to see competitive hockey games with the world’s best players. They don’t want – or need – to see Zdeno Chara skate untouched and put all his weight into a slap shot that goes into an open net at 103 mph. Fans want to watch Olympic hockey with NHL players. They can live without the All-Star Game and its festivities once every four years.

Right now, there is a buzz in the hockey world following Canada’s rout of Russia and Slovakia’s upset of Sweden. United States fans are anxious for Friday’s semifinal against Finland and sports media outlets are asking whether or not Team USA can knock off Team Canada twice in the same week if they meet again. Players like Ryan Miller and Patrick Kane are watching their stock rise thanks to national television exposure. It has all contributed to one very pleasant surprise because when was the last time the talk anywhere focused on hockey?

If Team USA takes home the gold, it will be the perfect ending to a perfect tournament, and will do wonders for the final weeks of the NHL season. I suggest you watch because it might never be the same again.

Author: Neil Keefe

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