michael grabner

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: The Rangers are a wildly mediocre team with major holes that and are not ready for a realistic shot at the Stanley Cup. The team we see before us is the culmination of learning the wrong lessons from tough losses over the past few years. It is the end result of ignoring process for goaltending-masked wins.

Regardless of how the Rangers got here, they are here now. The Blueshirts, despite the standings, are not a realistic shot to win the Cup. They struggled with Mika Zibanejad went down. They’ve been struggling since Chris Kreider went down. True contenders don’t fall off a cliff when they lose a top-six forward. The Rangers have, twice.

You can blame it on the players. You can blame it on the front office. You can blame it on the coaching staff. In reality, all three are to blame. And if you’ve been watching the past six weeks, you know that the best teams will score at will against the Rangers. There is not one single solution that will fix this club in time to make a run. And that doesn’t even account for the return of Kreider, which is far from a guarantee this season.

Even if Kreider were to return, there is still the massive hole at 2C that David Desharnais cannot fill. There is still the, um, something, on defense. The system? The process? I don’t know. But it stinks.

The good news is that the Blueshirts have a bunch of players that could possibly fetch a good haul at the deadline. Michael Grabner’s 19 goals will fetch a pretty penny. As will Rick Nash’s dominating force on the ice. The corpse of Nick Holden might get something from a team that is desperate. The resurgence of Ondrej Pavelec could get something too, if there are teams in the hunt with goaltending concerns (Carolina?).

I can certainly understand the concerns of throwing away a season while still in the hunt. After all, we just want the team to win. What good would buying a center at the deadline do, though? Get them another win or two? This team is still one-and-done, possibly out in the second round if they get hot, or their opponent forgets they can get 40+ shots a game with relative ease against the Blueshirts.

The sell and rebuild on the fly approach worked for the Yankees just last year. They committed to it though. They sold off their valuable assets and let the kids play. Jeff Gorton (and Glen Sather and Jim Dolan) can’t just dip a toe in the selling waters for this to work. They need to make a full dive, head first. Sacrificing this year for the next two is the tough decision, but right decision, to make.

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