How the New York Rangers’ Decline Made Me A More Critical Observer
I have a group of friends at school that I tend to watch New York Rangers’ games with. We’ll get together, put on our jerseys and sit down to watch the game at our fraternity house. Four minutes into a game, Tanner Glass takes the ice. He fumbles a pass, fails to win the ensuing loose puck battle, and despite his “enforcer” status fails to make any physical contact with the opposing defenseman, who easily moves the puck up ice. I make a comment about Glass, with no response from my fellow observers. A minute later, Dan Girardi is battling in the corner. He wins the puck and blindly throws it up the boards, where the other team’s blueliner recovers it easily and directs it on net. Girardi, not known for being fleet of foot, struggles to keep pace with his mark, yet a deflection in front of the net is thwarted thanks to a fantastic pad save by Henrik Lundqvist. I groan and launch into one of my tirades about Girardi’s lack of awareness with the puck.
“Shut up Della, you’re always being so negative about the team,” interjects one of my friends. He’s been spouting off all season about how the Rangers are obviously going to win the Stanley Cup, despite the fact that they are a mediocre-at-best possession team with porous defense being bailed out by an all-world goaltender.
And he’s right. To them, it seems like I’m always complaining about what the team isn’t doing right. They think it’s because I’m a pessimist. I think it’s because I hold my team to a very high standard and I look at sports critically and logically. If the team isn’t successful, I want them to make a change to be successful.
I remember following the Rangers’ postseason run in 2014, when they reached the Stanley Cup Final for the first time since six months before I was born. Being from the New York area, I had grown up with the media always treating the local hockey teams like second-rate organizations, and it was really cool to turn on Boomer and Carton during my drive to school and hear them spend a considerable chunk of their show talking about the Rangers. That series against the Los Angeles Kings didn’t go so well for the Rangers and people like to point to a couple of seemingly obvious reasons why: an imbalance of power at the center position and the bad play of Rick Nash. I think it was due to other issues: the refusal to sit an ineffective and line-anchoring Brad Richards, the lack of trust in young players and the insistence on forcing Dan Girardi into a role that he was never suited for. For the first time, I questioned conventional thought regarding hockey and became curious about the way teams make decisions and position themselves to win.
That offseason, my interest only grew as the Rangers submarined, throwing away much of what had made them a Stanley Cup contender with a huge window of opportunity. After giving Dan Girardi a contract extension that was about three times his actual value, the team let Anton Stralman, quietly the team’s second best defenseman, walk away in free agency. The late-blooming 27-year old defenseman who proved to be the perfect partner for a post-eye injury Marc Staal was cast away in favor of a 37-year old power play specialist whose best years were well behind him. In some situations the Rangers made smart moves: Brian Boyle and Benoit Pouliout, while effective role players, wanted a chance for a payday, and letting them go was unfortunate but necessary. Other points in the offseason featured horrendous moves, such as signing Tanner Glass to a three-year, $1.45 million per year contract. By bringing on this “physical enforcer” who received no favorable reviews from fans of his previous teams and as a Ranger has failed to provide much of a physical presence (or actual hockey playing) while he is on the ice, the team lost what was the hallmark of that 2013–2014 Rangers’ squad: a uniquely talented fourth line which provided the Rangers with a favorable matchup for 10–12 minutes a night.
In the years since, the Rangers have made some up-and-down moves. They’ve acquired some great talent at discounted rates in Kevin Hayes and Jimmy Vesey, and have built up a strong core of young, talented players including Derek Stepan, Chris Kreider and J.T. Miller. However, they have also exhibited poor asset management such as trading a top prospect and a high draft pick for Keith Yandle, who was mismanaged for a year and a half before being traded away due to insufficient cap space. They also paid a ransom for an aging Eric Staal who played in five playoff games for the team.
By this point, you probably agree with my friends and think that I just have an incredibly negative view of the Rangers. The reason why I point all of this out, though, is because it forced me to look more critically at what was actually going on with this team and how assumptions about success and the real reasons behind success can be at odds. Today, everyone is talking about how the Rangers’ championship window is closing, mostly due to the age, cap hit and declining play of their older players. The Rangers, so the story goes, sold out to win now, and are now paying the price. Except I don’t buy that notion. The closest this team was to “win now” was in June of 2014. If they traded Dan Girardi for a haul while his value was still sky-high, kept an extreme value in Anton Stralman on the roster, and kept those draft picks and prospects instead of trading for big-name players who the organization couldn’t even agree on how to use, the team would have been better in 2015 and 2016 and there wouldn’t be any discussion about how the team’s future looks bleak with the prospect pool drying up.
My studies in school relate to organizational management and using talent and resources as effectively as possible. Each draft pick, prospect or roster player that a team has represents a certain amount of value. While value can be created through great drafting and trading, value can also be lost through poor evaluation leading to bad decision-making. It’s a bit of a puzzle, which makes it fun to piece things together and attempt to figure out how to best approach the situation. In this blog, that is what I hope to do. I want to look at teams, players and front offices and see why things are done and whether or not they are effective. I want to talk about unconventional ideas I have about the way teams can be constructed, the way trades should be made, and the way coaches should use their players. Some of it may seem crazy and some of it may be plain stupid but I think it’s worth talking about.
The Rangers are a team that I will discuss often in this forum. They’re how I got my start following hockey, became a fan and learned many of the great things that the sport has to offer. As a player growing up, I’ve always looked up to defenseman such as Brian Leetch and Ryan McDonagh. People who look critically at their teams, as well as those who are heavily involved in statistical analysis, are often told that “the game is played on the ice, not on a spreadsheet.” I would completely agree and argue that if I didn’t care about the on-ice product, I would instead apply the same techniques to something like finance or healthcare. We talk about sports because it evokes emotion and passion that is unmatched in almost anything else you can do. That’s why I complain to my friends about Dan Girardi and Tanner Glass — because at the end of the day, the euphoria and sense of accomplishment from winning a game, a playoff series and ultimately a championship are why we play, watch, study and love this game.
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