be a ranger?

be a ranger?

The draft is a great time to assess the needs of a team, to see where the front office is focusing and to guess how the team will utilize what they have and leverage their way to higher picks. It’s also a really great time to play make believe.

On Thursday, I posed a fun question to Rangers twitter: who is your dream Ranger? The one factor I threw out there is that it has to be a current player. Otherwise, we’re in total fantasy land: no cap hit, no trade issues, no restrictions. Your responses were pretty fantastic.

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There were more responses, but this sample shows all that needs to be said: we fantasize about skill on our team. It’s a telling sign that several responses of Patrick Kane (deplorable as he may be as a human, nobody handles the puck like he does), Vladimir Tarasenko, and even PK Subban. One may say that this skill comes at the expense of defensive ability (“grit,” if you will), but that would be incorrect.

These players, for starters, are not all forwards. Aaron Ekblad, Erik Karlsson, Subban, and Kevin Shattenkirk are all defensemen who have huge offensive upsides (the four combined for 213 points last season, with Karlsson netting 82) and are competent at their role on D. These players move the puck, skate fluidly, and see the play and its potential before it happens. These are special players.

This isn’t to knock those players who have to try hard because they aren’t gifted unnatural talent at birth. You can’t have an entire team of Ovechkins and van Riemsdyks. There is a reason these players are the cream of the crop and that their talent is rare. However, it is important to override this idea that you can’t have several good things on one team, simply because you need to have lots of hard workers. Spoiler alert: all of these guys work hard. Even Kevin Hayes.

Once you get to the NHL, you’re looking at all elite athletes. These men have worked since they were children to be great, training in ways that 9-to-5 people cannot. Saying that some people don’t work hard enough because their talent seems effortless is something that is said out of jealousy and, quite frankly, a childlike mindset. It seems that, with the draft picks the Rangers made, they’re finally understanding this.

Losing Keith Yandle last week was frustrating for a bevy of reasons, one of which being that we took a wonderful puck moving, offensive-minded defenseman and traded his rights after not leveraging what we could have at last year’s trade deadline. It personally victimizes me because it seems as though the Rangers don’t quite understand that you can have several good things, as opposed to just one. Brady Skjei is coming into his first (hopefully) full season as a Ranger, and he should be good; wouldn’t it have been nice to have a mentor in Yandle?

Again, it is a positive that the Rangers seem to have valued sound skating and good puck-moving in the draft, so I won’t be too tough on the Rangers: I do like them, after all. I only hope they will take a note from their fans and try to focus on trading for or signing guys with effortless skill.

Who is your dream Ranger?

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