The Power of a Promise

(Jamie Sabau/NHLI via Getty Images)

A pall has descended over Rangerstown, and it’s sucking the fun out of the game. The Rangers are barely winning anymore, they’re doing that thing again where they totally mismanage injuries, Henrik Lundqvist is on pace to play way too many games, Cody McLeod is now a New York Ranger, and AV is still around, up to his old tricks.

The team, seeming lacking in any sense of direction or coherence, is now rumored to be decidedly in the selling camp as we approach the deadline, and likely beyond that to the draft. You’ll have to excuse me for being cynical about whether any of that comes to pass, or whether any of it is well executed, given the state of things. The Rangers have somehow taken a consistently good thing and in one season (but actually over the course of many seasons, which I’ll get to) turned it bad. How did we get here?

To explain myself a little bit before we start, in school I studied political science, with a particular focus on institutions and the way they develop. This meant looking at the big picture in most circumstances, starting at point A, and attempting to determine the dynamics that resulted in point B. Some of the principles involved in this kind of analysis are applicable to the Rangers current predicament I think, in particular the concept of layered development, and the idea of path dependence. The former basically looks at the way things are not always one coherent idea but many possibly contradictory ideas on differing time schedules stuck together into some kind of Frankenstein monster, and the latter has to do with the way that once you’ve made a decision you often foreclose other options you might have down the road.

To apply this to what’s going on with our beloved Rangers, it’s important to start somewhere at the beginning. We don’t need to quite go back to the 1920s, but why not start at the single most important event in contemporary Rangers history: the beginning of the Henrik Lundqvist era. Following the Cup win of 1994, the Rangers were unable to sustain their success for too long and fell into a bad habit of high priced free agent signings, complete with a less than stellar farm system. Things began to change however, when Henrik Lundqvist entered the picture and it became clear that the Rangers had a foundational piece around which they could build.

From there the Rangers began to develop their own talent, sort of. Risings stars who were drafted and/or developed by the Rangers included guys like Ryan Callahan, Brandon Dubinsky, Dan Girardi, and Marc Staal, but the Rangers were still spending on major free agent signings – Brad Richards and Marian Gaborik. This new era mostly began around the same time; Gaborik was acquired in the 2009 offseason, new head coach John Tortorella signed in 2009 as well, Ryan Callahan played his first full season in 08-09 while Dubinsky and Staal played their first full seasons one year prior and Dan Girardi a year before that, etc. Anisimov was a little bit later than those guys, and Richards signed in 2011, but by the end of the first decade of the new millennium the Rangers had a squad on their hands.

The late aughts were also marked by the drafting of the University of Wisconsin’s star center in 2008 and the trade of Scott Gomez to the Montreal Canadiens in exchange for a package that included an obscure Minnesotan blueliner in 2009. These moves wouldn’t quite pay dividends for a few years, but the seeds were planted as some prior moves came to fruition.

It was around this time that the Rangers made an implicit promise to Henrik Lundqvist and the fanbase: every year the King was on the team, they would make their best effort to contend. Now, I’m not going to get into the merits or demerits of this approach, because it’s worth noting that over the course of basically a decade, speaking only for myself, I’ve had countless great playoff memories that I wouldn’t give up for the world, save a Stanley Cup. It doesn’t change the fact however, that this became a grand strategy of sorts, and it set us on a path that leads to where we are today.

As this first core of players began prosper for the Rangers in the 2012 playoffs (where a certain BC hockey star made his raucous debut, another important inflection point in our story) things would continue to change, with the most notable acquisition up to this point for the Rangers going down in the 2012 offseason. After a moderately successful but ultimately disappointing Cup run (it was a special time, but “Henrique it’s over!” still haunts me) the Rangers came to the realization that their missing piece was on the trade market, and so they sprung for Rick Nash in exchange for Artem Anisimov, Brandon Dubinsky, Tim Erixon, and a 2013 first. Here for the first time we really see the floorboards being ripped up in the house of Rangers, all while the framing of the house remains. It’s also worth noting that the Rangers came out of that trade with a third round pick, which becomes important later in our tale.

This was maybe the second or third time the Rangers decided they had obtained their “missing piece” in the Henrik Lundqvist era (Gaborik and Richards being the other two), and the first time they did so via trade. There was of course an incredibly stupid lockout ruining all the fun, and following a shortened season the Rangers made an unfortunate exit from the playoffs at the hands of the Boston Bruins.  It was at this point that the Rangers management began to reevaluate their promise, and they fired Torts just four days following their elimination from the post season, opting to hire the newly available Vancouver Canucks coach Alain Vigneault, who would hopefully be the other missing piece and would unlock the scoring potential of guys like Rich Nash and Chris Kreider.

I’m not going to go too much more into detail about this time period, because it’s for the most part fresh in our collective memory. I will point out though that the Rangers kept good, or attempted to keep good on their promise throughout the early days of this era, fumigating the house that Tortorella built once again with the trade of Ryan Callahan to the Tampa Bay Lightning in exchange for Martin St Louis and finding themselves just this short of a Cup. They would do this twice again in an attempt to recapture that success in the AV era with the trades for Keith Yandle (that included a young Anthony Duclair) and Eric Staal (which involved Aleksi Saarela as well as draft picks), moves that further depleted their farm system.

The St Louis trade is important however because it was a sequence that involved the trading of high draft picks – two first rounders – which would eventually help cause their dependance on undrafted free agent signings. That strategy had paid off for them in the past with the development of Dan Girardi and Mats Zuccarello into core members of the team, but the Rangers now desperately needed such a strategy to pan out as they no longer had high draft picks to fill in the gaps of an aging roster. Their last first rounder for several years, JT Miller, luckily panned out despite the coach’s best efforts, and two of their lower draft picks, Brady Skjei and Pavel Buchnevich (he of the Rick Nash trade third rounder) becoming veritable NHLers.

Still, the choices the Rangers made earlier in this epoch forced their hand later on – the constant trading of draft picks and prospects meant they needed guys like Kevin Hayes and Jimmy Vesey to even have a shot at remaining relevant and if Miller, Skjei and Buchnevich were busts then things really would’ve gone south by this point. Their promise to Henrik Lundqvist to remain in contention, and the way they went about attempting to fulfill that promise had begun to fold inwards on itself, with a Stanley Cup becoming less and less likely each year.

These dumb decisions forced the Rangers hand in another way: they wound up trading Derek Stepan and Antti Raanta for the 7th overall pick and Anthony DeAngelo, and given the fact that they had their own first round pick at 21 for the first time since the Miller selection, a double dip in the opening stages of the draft seemed highly appropriate. With the buying out of Dan Girardi and the signing of Kevin Shattenkirk, as well as the re-upping of Brendan Smith (another move that cost, you guessed it, draft picks) the Rangers core shifted once again, all while the coach they hired four years prior would continuously show a total lack of ability to shift with it.

This brings us to present day, where the layered development of these decisions are now obviously holding the Rangers back; unadaptive coaching, the delayed availability of DeAngelo, Andersson, and Chytil (a “rebuild on the fly” looking more just like a pedestrian rebuild), and a core that in some ways bears the marks of the heyday Rangers and in others is completely indistinguishable from those glory days has become a recipe for mediocrity.

At this point, the Rangers now have very few options, because a little less than a decade’s worth of decision making has come home to roost. Now we’re at the point of nearly a full rebuild, with the Rangers attentively listening to offers on expiring free agents Rick Nash and Michael Grabner (thank god he turned into a superstar, or else we’d really be cooked) and apparently listening to offers on Ryan McDonagh and Mats Zuccarello, two other holdovers from the sweet spot of the Rangers’ contending days. We’re in the process of watching Jeff Gorton attempting to reconstruct what was once a shining city on a hockey hill that has fallen into disrepair, building around a core that includes few high-end players (Kreider, Miller, and hopefully Buch and Skjei will be the Rangers’ stars as this third or fourth segment of the Henrik Lundqvist era carries on, but that’s about it) and even fewer bluechip prospects.

It is of course simply a reality of hockey that a team’s core shifts over time and is at any given point different colored jawbreaker layers rotting away at a team’s teeth, but what I’m trying to get at is it’s the way the Rangers have lacquered one era on top of the other that has brought us to this point. The decisions of yore have created the constraints of today, and put the Rangers management team in quite the pickle. Hell, even the brain trust is half Glen Sather and half Jeff Gorton, with seemingly no way to tell what’s what.

So again, you’ll have to excuse my cynicism at the news that the Rangers are now intent on being sellers. It could all just be smoke and mirrors to motivate guys into playing better (hard to see how Nash Grabner, or Mats Zuccarello could be playing much better though given the circumstances) but if there is any truth to it I still find it hard to be optimistic about the direction this team is headed in. For the first time in my hockey adulthood I’m not feeling so hot on this team, and as each season in the Lundqvist era passes with a decreasing likelihood of him winning a Stanley Cup it becomes harder and harder to keep that spark of carefree enjoyment alive. The Rangers have all but killed what’s fun about this team by creating a Voltron robot out of mediocre parts, and at this point I’m not so sure they can rebuild it in time for our King’s coronation.