The dynamic is going to change next year. The addition of Rick Nash to an equation from which Brandon Dubinsky, Artem Anisimov and Brandon Prust have been subtracted makes the Rangers more of a top-heavy team going into 2012-13, whenever it begins.
Depth has been compromised. Dependency on young Chris Kreider and Carl Hagelin to accelerate the learning curve is not insignificant. If the season starts on or close to schedule, Marian Gaborik likely would miss at least the first quarter of the year.
That’s why the Rangers remain keenly interested in signing free agent winger Shane Doan, who will turn 36 in early October and is seeking a four-year deal as he confronts the separation issues that will accompany his departure from Phoenix, his home for the last 16 years.
Doan, who understandably wants this to be the last move he makes, is believed to have narrowed his sights on Manhattan, Pittsburgh and Vancouver. It’s unclear if Rangers general manager Glen Sather is willing to go four years, but if he does, Doan is more likely than not to become a Blueshirt.
At the same time, albeit unlikely, it isn’t impossible Doan could accept three years to come to Broadway for a reunion with coach John Tortorella, who may have issues with people skills, but sure doesn’t drive people away from wanting to reunite with him on his hockey team when given the opportunity.
And actually, as much as the dynamic will change, the Rangers will first and foremost remain Tortorella’s team. There is no doubt about that. The primary reason the Blueshirts had few, if any, second thoughts about dealing Tim Erixon to the Blue Jackets is the coach couldn’t envision the finesse-oriented 21-year-old defenseman fitting into the style he demands.
If the Rangers were fixated on acquiring Nash as they were for six months before pulling off the trade on July 23, they couldn’t have made a better deal than the one in which they sent away Dubinsky, Anisimov and Erixon. But it’s not as if the team yielded nothing; not as if the Rangers merely sent spare parts the other way.
Dubinsky, 26, was a first-wave Blueblood building block who was steadily improving until he fell off the rails last year. Anisimov, 24, was often a puzzle, but he was the team’s first-line left wing for more than 50 games last year on a unit with Derek Stepan and Gaborik that carried the team offensively through the guts of the season.
And Erixon, whom management crowed about acquiring from the Flames last summer, represented the only blue line depth in the organization.
There was a price to be paid for acquiring Nash beyond the $7.8 million per on his contract that runs through 2017-18. At 28, the 6-foot-4, 220-pound power winger was a formidable and often dominant force through the first part of his nine-year career before becoming somewhat less than that playing for a perennially bad team and a dysfunctional organization.
Now, Nash has the opportunity to shine on the big stage, the chance to reassert his dominance playing meaningful games. The Rangers will need him to be a force, will need him to play big and score big goals, not only throughout the regular season, but more importantly, in the playoffs, where the team got to three only seven times in 20 games last year.
The creation of chemistry between Nash and Brad Richards shouldn’t prove as painstaking as the process a year ago with Richards and Gaborik. The power winger’s game is more elementary than Gaborik’s nuanced approach.
No other team in the East has added a player of Nash’s significance. But in doing so — and while concurrently, albeit correctly, allowing Prust to defect to Montreal — the Rangers evolved into a different team.
It should be a better team come April and May and into June. That’s really all that counts now. Division, conference, seed, not so much.
But in order to become that team, in order to take the next step and win the six extra games they could not win last season, Nash has to be the player he was the first half of his career and not the one who played the last few years in Columbus.
* So the CBA negotiations basically can be summarized thusly: The big-market teams don’t want to pay the small-market teams, the small-market teams don’t want to pay the players, and so, of course, the NHL is stuck in its flawed approach that satisfies both of these constituencies while reaching deep into the athletes’ pockets but doing nothing to generate revenue for cash-poor franchises.
Brian Burke, who was GM of the Canucks the last two years of Mark Messier’s three seasons in Vancouver, testified on behalf of No. 11 in his winning grievance against the franchise in which he was awarded approximately $6 million, Slap Shots has learned.
Multiple individuals report the case was black-and-white, and never should have proceeded to arbitration given the clause in Messier’s registered contract he signed with the Canucks in 1997 that called for him to get a percentage of the increase in franchise value upon the team’s sale.
Charles Wang says the case should have been decided by Gary Bettman.