IT IS not quite Napoleon returning triumphantly to Paris to resume command of his troops, but it is close. And sometime this week, the official announcement will be made, amid all of the pomp and circumstance attendant to the return of a hero.
For what has been expected ever since Neil Smith’s March 28 dismissal and what has seemed inevitable since Glen Sather’s June 1 appointment as president and GM is now reality.
Mark Messier will be returning to Broadway to resume command of his Blueshirts.
Exiled by Smith and Garden president Dave Checketts three years ago, The Captain this weekend agreed to a two-year deal worth $8 million – a $2M signing bonus plus $3M per – sources have told The Post.
Exiled by Smith and Checketts because they feared he had become too powerful within the locker room and because they resented his and his father/agent Doug Messier’s hardball negotiating tactics in 1994, Messier now will be asked by Sather to assert his power in the locker room over a tattered band of mostly self-interested mercenarie$ that missed the playoffs all three years No. 11 was in Vancouver.
Messier, who will turn 40 in January, will join a team that today should announce the signing of free-agent defenseman Vladimir Malakhov to a deal believed to be worth $3.5M per over four seasons. He will join a team that remains very much in contention to sign Claude Lemieux to a long-term deal.
He will join a group of centers that, at least for now, includes Petr Nedved, whose competitiveness Messier questioned when the two were Ranger teammates during the 1995 lockout season; Mike York, the Calder finalist; Tim Taylor, the checking specialist whose game fell apart the final month of the season; Manny Malhotra, eligible for the first time to play at Hartford, if necessary, and Jamie Lundmark, hopeful of making the jump from junior hockey at age 19.
Messier, who played his last game as a Ranger in the elimination Game 5 of the 1997 Eastern Finals against the Flyers on May 25, 1997, played 66 games last season for the Canucks, registering 17 goals and 37 assists. In three years in Vancouver – three years in which the Canucks failed to make the playoffs – Messier played 207 games, scoring 52 goals with 110 assists for 162 points.
He became an unrestricted free agent on July 1 after the Canucks paid him a $2M buyout rather than exercise their option to bring him back for 2000-2001 at a salary of $6M. Free, and with the $2M in his pocket, Messier’s dealings with Sather, a man whom he trusts and respects, were straightforward. In truth, there was never even the slightest possibility of Messier signing anywhere else.
In truth, once Smith was fired, there was never more than the slightest possibility of Messier playing 2000-2001 anywhere else but here, where he will again assume command of his soldiers.
But the Rangers won’t want to push this Napoleon returns thing too far. See, barely 100 days after the general’s return, his army was defeated at Waterloo and he was exiled again, this time permanently.