At some point during the early nineties, when the Rangers were building toward a Stanley Cup run by making six separate deals with Edmonton for Mark Messier, Adam Graves, Kevin Lowe, Jeff Beukeboom, Esa Tikkanen and Craig MacTavish, then-general manager Neil Smith famously deadpanned, “What do you want me to do, trade for Sharks?”
The Sharks at the time were NHL bottom-feeders absent any winning tradition. Actually, San Jose had no tradition at all, having entered the league in 1991.
You might say the Sharks would be a time-capsule equivalent of the Blue Jackets, a franchise that has never won a playoff game since entering the NHL in 2000 while qualifying for the postseason tournament just one time in 12 seasons.
What do you want Rangers GM Glen Sather to do, trade for Blue Jackets?
Blueshirts and Blue Jackets and JD, oh my, (or is that, oh baby!?) at the Garden on Thursday — with club president John Davidson leading his team into town for a Metropolitan Division showdown that probably would be better placed on an NBC Rivalry Wednesday.
For there was Rick Nash, once the face of the Jackets, now the best player on the Rangers. There was Brandon Dubinsky, part of the initial influx of home-grown Broadway Bluebloods that included Ryan Callahan, Dan Girardi and Marc Staal, wearing the visiting white.
John Moore, once a Jacket, was on the Rangers’ blue line and Derek Dorsett, once a Columbus staple up front playing for the home team, even as Derick Brassard was sidelined with a sore posterior. Artem Anisimov, once an important part of the young core of Rangers, was wearing No. 42 for Columbus even while Marian Gaborik was sidelined with a knee injury.
The July 23, 2012 trade for Nash in which the Rangers yielded Dubinsky, Anisimov, defenseman Tim Erixon (a healthy scratch for this one who has bounced between Columbus and the AHL) and a 2013 first-round draft selection stands as a line of demarcation for the Blueshirts.
For just as the club had transformed itself from a free-agent-based business to a homegrown operation coming out of the 2004-05 lockout, this move reversed the process. The Rangers, who had fallen two victories short of the 2012 Stanley Cup Final, decided the missing piece was not time, but in Columbus.
That, of course, was Nash, the high-scoring power forward who had been the first overall selection of the 2002 Entry Draft and asked out of Columbus the previous winter after finally tiring of the franchise’s perpetual rebuild.
The deal for Nash coupled with coach John Tortorella’s decision to play No. 61 on the right side, where Gaborik had previously been ensconced on the top line, made No. 10 redundant.
Gaborik had one of the strangest careers in Rangers history. He had two seasons in which he scored 40 or more goals, joining Mike Gartner and Jean Ratelle as the only Rangers ever to score at least 40 more than once. His goals-per-game of .447 (114 goals in 255 games) is fourth in franchise history among players with at least 100 goals, trailing only Gartner (.537), Pierre Larouche (.486) and legendary Hall of Famer Bill Cook (.483).
But Gaborik’s other two seasons on Broadway were dreadful as he feuded intermittently with Tortorella. He was repeatedly benched last season after proving incapable of making the move to left wing after a lifetime on the right.
And so, he was ultimately dealt at the deadline, waiving his no-trade clause to go to Columbus in the Exchange, Part II for Brassard, Moore and Dorsett. Would Gaborik had agreed to go if he had known Tortorella himself would be gone within months? Probably not.
But the sniper — who was not exactly tearing it up for the Jackets with five goals in 17 games before he went down and will certainly be on the market as a deadline rental — would likely have been gone anyway by the summer as an amnesty buyout with a $7.5 million annual cap charge.
The Rangers had decided the building process had taken them as far as it would go. The idea was to win the Stanley Cup. The transformation hasn’t exactly worked out as anyone planned. A championship seems as far away as it did in the late eighties.
Which was before Smith started collecting Oilers, not Sharks.