Yesterday’s victory over the Flyers that represented a 360 from Friday’s folly on Long Island does not change Devils Surgeon General Lou Lamoriello’s mandate going forward, for though his team went 3-1 last week, the GM’s primary obligation is to conduct hockey triage the rest of the way in order to build the best club possible for next year.
That doesn’t mean John MacLean won’t or shouldn’t coach to win each night and it doesn’t mean the athletes who lace them up have any obligation beyond climbing out of this ditch they’ve dug and making a run at eighth place.
Still, whether Lamoriello or owner Jeff Vanderbeek cares for the notion, getting the gate from a handful of playoff dates should not be management’s primary objective. Rather, the Devils’ mission should be to confine the damage to this season before reasserting themselves next season as upper-echelon contenders.
That’s how the Flyers and GM Paul Holmgren approached matters in 2006-07 after getting off to starts of 1-6-1, 5-12-2, 8-15-4 and ultimately 8-24-4 on their way to a 30th-overall, 22-48-12 season that earned the club the second overall pick in the draft after the Blackhawks won the lottery. And just imagine Philadelphia today with Patrick Kane rather than James Van Riemsdyk.
The Devils’ situation is slightly different, in that Zach Parise, Martin Brodeur and Jamie Langenbrunner have all been sidelined for substantial periods of time. The front office can dream that when healthy, the Devils will fulfill the manifest destiny projected by a nitwit on this paper, but that would be shortsighted indeed, because there is no indication the Devils and Ilya Kovalchuk have figured out how to maximize his effectiveness on a team that seems chemistry-free whenever the soloist is on the ice.
Holmgren had one ace to play, and that was Peter Forsberg as a rental. His trade to Nashville that ultimately brought back Scottie Upshall, Kimmo Timonen and Scott Hartnell represented the underpinning of the immediate 2007-08 revival.
Lamoriello doesn’t quite have that ace. What he has on his team are nine players with no-trade clauses who would have to be massaged in order to be moved — impending free agents Jamie Langenbrunner and Jason Arnott are worthy — and what he has is Martin Brodeur.
Understand, the only way a Brodeur trade becomes a part of the conversation is if the all-time goaltender himself initiates the conversation with Lamoriello.
If that were to happen, if Brodeur, 38 and on the penultimate season of his contract, were to tell Lamoriello that he’d be OK with a trade to a blue-chip contender in need of a blue-chip goaltender, oh, and let’s just say he names Washington, then Lamoriello might well have his Forsberg and the Devils might well have John Carlson or Karl Alzner — or Mike Green? — plus a young forward along with a critically needed No. 1.
This one will be up to Brodeur, who may want to retire as unarguably the greatest goaltender in NHL history to spend his entire career with one club and has certainly earned that right.
Regardless, it will be up to Lamoriello to keep his eyes on the fork in the road dividing this year from next year, even if it means taking a direction he has never before quite had to follow.
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The Garden people responsible for the bottom line must have spent the summer at Yankee Stadium, where from the moment you walk in until the moment you leave, the scoreboard is used as a vehicle to bombard the paying customers into spending more (Food!), more than that (Better food!), and even more than that (Uniforms!).
Did you hear? You can buy an official 85th Anniversary Heritage Jersey for about as much as it cost Tex Rickard
to buy the Rangers 85 years ago.
Enough!
And, if we can slip into our summer attire for a moment, it’s beyond insulting the Yankees sell nothing but history from morning until night 365 days a year on their network and in their gilded ballpark, but then don’t want to pay a nickel for it when it comes to negotiating contracts with the icons responsible for creating that history.
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Wait. We’re beginning to get the idea that all mocking of Glen Sather
for giving up a third to L.A. for Brian Boyle
must cease and desist.
The NHL, where words don’t matter (in the Rulebook regarding the Sean Avery
face-guarding statute, in the CBA regarding circumvention) unless they are sexually suggestive.
Who’s got Steven Stamkos
going first in the All Star choose-up event?
When Mike Richards
talks about P.K. Subban
needing to show respect for his elders, he means like the way he respected Peter Forsberg
when they were teammates in Philadelphia, and the way he respected David Booth
in that game last year, right?
The name is the same, but this Matthew Barnaby
of ESPN who doesn’t like anything Avery does, this can’t be the same headhunting turtler who used to play in the league, is it?
Kovalchuk
, Ovechkin
and Semin
should have made sure to laugh in English. That probably would have taken care of it.
Finally, Quick Quiz. True, False or the Biggest Falsehood Ever: The Blue Jackets hiring Scott Arniel
as coach after being rejected by Guy Boucher
is like the Rangers hiring Bryan Trottier
in 2002 after being rejected by Herb Brooks
.