“It has been said something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world.” – Chaos Theory
The Time: Spring, 2004
The Place: MSG Front Offices
The Crossroad: After missing the playoffs for the 7th consecutive season and a long string of unsuccessful big name acquistions, Glen Sather decides to clean house, beginning with household names such as Brian Leetch and Alexei Kovalev. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Joel Quenneville had just been fired as head coach of the St. Louis Blues, despite having 7 consecutive winning seasons and consistently being ranked among the league’s top teams. In the midst of these moves Sather decides to hire Tom Renney, the Director of Player Personnel, to groom and develop the youth movement. With the lockout imminent, the Rangers are taking a new approach towards building a team.
The Impact: Tom Renney enjoys relatively good success developing a predominantly young Rangers unit, but never gets passed the 2nd Round of the East Playoffs. As the team begins to falter in his 4th season, Renney is subsequently fired and replaced with the firy John Tortorella, and everyone is happy (for now). As this is going on, Quenneville has caught on with the Colorado Avalanche and leads them to three-consecutive 95 point seasons in the ultra-competitive Western Conference, missing the playoffs in just one of those seasons. At the end of his 3rd season, Quenneville decides to leave the Colorado organization, catching on as a pro Scout with the Chicago Blackhawks. Just one month into the job, Quenneville is promoted to head coach, and leads a young, talented group with the likes of Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, and Brent Seabrook to the Western Conference finals (possibly further).
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Caught myself watching Game 7 of the Wings-Ducks. The Wings are just so amazingly stacked. Its unreal how they develop talent, and when you break down their roster, 1/3 of them hail from the same country as his Highness. Its no wonder the country won Gold at the Olympics and Detroit the Cup just a year ago. What’s amazing about these Wings is that for the most part, its all home-grown talent, none of which were extremely highly touted. Franzen, Zetterberg, Datsyuk, Samuelsson, Holmstrom, Filppula were all drafted in the 3rd round or later. Oh, and lets just throw in Niklas Lidstrom, who has been one of the top 3 defensemen every year for what seems like the last 3,000 years.
I applaud the Wings and their front-office. Simply amazing
Sean Avery will be appearing at the NHL Store on 47th and 6th to guest host the SIRIUS XM Radio talk show, Ice Breakers. They will be taking live questions about the 2009 playoffs from fans that attend. It sounds like it could be really cool to go to. Too bad I’ll be working.
If anyone goes, send us an email with the experience and we will post it.
Update 5:40pm Yea, this is today. Forgot to add that part. It’s been a long few weeks at work.
As draft day nears, there are always “ideas” of trades, especially of the large contracts. Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s look at who the Rangers have given no-trade clauses (NTC) and no-movement clauses (NMC). Information courtesy of NHLSCAP.com:
- Chris Drury: Full NMC
- Scott Gomez: NTC – has 3 teams he will not accept a trade to.
- Wade Redden: NTC – has 8 teams he will not acept a trade to.
- Michael Rozsival: NTC – has 8 teams that he will not accept a trade to.
Essentially, everyone other than Drury is moveable. Is it likely that these guys will be moved? No. The player with the biggest chance of being moved is Rozsival, but that is also highly unlikely.
This is just food for thought while everyone comes up with their wild trade scenarios.
In our quest to help you understand the cap, we have put numbers behind the Rangers faithful requests to buy out Wade Redden. From that post, you can see the cap rammifications of such a buyout. Is it worth it? Well, that’s for Glen Sather to decide.
Redden isn’t the only popular buyout candidate, as Aaron Voros, seemingly with no spot on a John Tortorella roster, has had his name thrown around the blog-o-sphere for a potential buyout. Voros signed a 3 year / $3 million contract before last season. Thus, he has 2 years / $2 million left on his contract with the Rangers, and a $1 million cap hit as of this moment.
Voros’ salary was front-loaded, and he is set to make $900,000 / year for the next two years. Let’s run through the buyout numbers:
- (1) Buyout Amount: (900,000 * 2 years) * 2/3 = $1.2 million
- (2) 2x Remaining Years: 2 years * 2 = 4 years
- (3) Spread buyout amount (1) equally through 2x reamaining years (2): $1.2 million / 4 = $300,000
So, Aaron Voros can have a $1 million cap hit for this year and next, or a $300,000 cap hit for the next four years. It saves the Rangers $700,000 in cap room for two years, but costs them $300,000 in cap room for the following two years. Personally, I wouldn’t do it. I would just let him play in Hartford (thus clearing the $1 million cap hit anyway), and call up Dane Byers.
Remember way back when to the John Tortorella signing? Jim Schoenfeld was named as interim Assistant Coach, but the Rangers were really targeting Mike Sullivan. Well, as per Damian Cristodero and his Lightning Strikes blog:
GM Brian Lawton said he has given associate coach Mike Sullivan permission to speak to other teams. It is well known Sullivan wants to be a head coach, and the Oilers and Wild jobs are open. As for remaining an associate, Lawton said he also gave Sullivan permission “for family reasons” to talk to teams closer to his Massachusetts hometown. It is not far-fetched to think Sullivan will get interest from the Rangers and former Lightning coach John Tortorella.
This was an expected move, as the Rangers, and Torts, will be targeting Sullivan as Schoenfeld’s replacement.
Update 1:45pm: For those of you who follow the the Lohud Rangers Blog, Jane held a contest, basically you guess which three Rangers fit into the stories she told. For those of you who care, that was me who won the contest. Sweet.
What a 3rd period that was in Chicago. What an implosion by the great Roberto Luongo. He allowed 7 goals on 30 shots. There were six goals in the wild third period, including three in a row by Chicago in a span of 3:17, with the final one coming with under four minutes left in the game. Congrats to the Hawks, who are advancing to their first Conference Finals since Tony Amonte was a Hawk. Whoever plays them (my guess is Detroit) is going to have their hands full. This team is young, hungry and for real.
As for the Pens/Caps series, the NHL got what they wanted. A very exciting series, back and forth all the time, great hitting, three OT games. I have definitely enjoyed watching this series, Game 6 was phenominal, and will be leaving work a little early tomorrow to catch all of Game 7.
As for the action tonight, Carolina is home trying to close out Boston, and Detroit is in Anaheim trying to do the same to the Ducks. The Confererence Semis, all four series, have been outstanding, and great to watch. If you are around tonight, and are looking for something to watch, turn on these games. At least Emerick makes the Versus broadcasts a little more tolerable.
On a side note, Bettman definitely got what he wanted from these playoffs. He is guaranteed an all-US Cup Finals. Should Detroit win tonight, he is guaranteed at least one Original Six team in the Finals. He is guaranteed two great hockey markets in the Cup Finals (yes, even Raleigh has a big market). These playoffs can really help bring the NHL back into the eyes of the US public…if the games weren’t on Versus.
Gary, I beg of you, break your contract with Versus, get the remaining games on NBC, no cost should stop you. These are going to be fantastic games.
Two games before Russia beat Canada in the World Championship Finals, Rangers winger (and RFA) Nikolai Zherdev broke his hand. You can read the translated article at Beyond the Blueshirts.
Off topic, finding a Russian-English translator online is tough. Nothing seems to translate properly.
Back on track, this doesn’t really affect the Rangers on the negotiating table. Broken bones heal, and this one will only take two weeks to heal. He’s still going to require a minimum of $3.55 million to resign (mandatory 10% raise for all qualifying offers to RFAs, check the ‘Understanding The Cap’ page for more deatils). We shall see how Sather handles this.
This occured over the weekend, but due to Mother’s Day, we were unable to post until this morning. Evgeny Grachev, sitting out his second game in a row with the flu, watched his Brampton Battalion lose Game 5 in OT. Brampton lost the series 4-1.
Meanwhile, Tysen Dowzak and his Kelowna Rockets won Game 6 in similarly OT dramatic fashion 3-2, and took home the WHL Championship, winning the series 4-2. Dowzak was held off the scoreboard and finished even for the game, but his contributions were essential to Kelowna winning the series. Dowzak is a very big (6’5 212 lbs) stay-at-home defensemen, who has shown great awareness in his own end. At just 20 years old, He is still a long ways away from the NHL, but he should develop into a solid defenseman.
Congratulations to Dowzak. Up next for him and the Rockets, QMJHL champion Rimouski in the Memorial Cup playoffs, on Friday May 15.
Most of you have heard the news by now that the Dolans, owners of the Cablevision franchise, are looking to spin off the Garden/Rangers/Knicks. Most people have greeted this with reckless optimism. I, on the other hand, am a little worried.
You see, for all of Dolan’s faults, such as blind faith in poor executives, he was never shy about spending for the Rangers. He let his trusty GM do all the work with a blank paycheck. Right now, the Rangers are one of a handful of teams that are consistently right on the cap every year. You can’t fault Dolan because Glen Sather didn’t use the money properly. You can fault him for his blind loyalty, but I already covered that, and it’s also not really the point of this post.
Based on the Bloomberg article linked above, the Garden franchise should draw interest from Mark Cuban. Cuban is another owner who will open his wallet to make sure that his team wins. And hey, he might have the balls to fire Sather. But let’s not get our hopes up. I mean, a lot of pieces would have to fall together for that optimal scenario.
The scary thing here is what happens if Dolan sells to an owner only looking to make money? Well, you can kiss any free agents goodbye. You can kiss any good young players we develop goodbye. The team will be run like the Nashville Predators. The only silver lining here is that there’s a cap floor, which means the new owner would have to spend at least $37 million on the team. This is the more likely scenario.
To quote one of my favorite shows, Scrubs, it’s easier to deal with the evil you know, than the evil you don’t.
