If it is true that pride goes before the fall, then if Glen Sather is too proud to admit his mistakes in signing Wade Redden, Michal Rozsival the second time and Donald Brashear, he has no place running the Rangers any longer.
If Sather is not willing to, a) admit to his fantastic errors in judgment; and, more important, b) suck it up and inform Jim Dolan that Cablevision must be willing to send what amounts to $39M in remaining contracts to the minor leagues in order to begin cleansing the environment, then the GM’s tenure of nearly 10 years has run its course.
Wednesday night’s 6-0 no-show against the Flyers in which the Rangers were so abysmal that the fans packing the Garden could barely be bothered to express their disgust any way other than by abandoning the place a couple of minutes into the third, was not simply unacceptable, it provided a window into the team’s empty soul.
The locker room has, again, become a collection of mercenaries with little allegiance to the sweater or, perhaps more disturbingly, to one another. If it is unacceptable that the Rangers don’t battle for the puck, it’s intolerable that they won’t battle for one another. The change in culture effected under Tom Renney following the lockout has dissipated.
Fat Cats again in our midst.
Fat Cats living large on Broadway.
This is no longer about this season and whether the Rangers can achieve their modest ceiling of low-seed playoff qualification and ensuing first-round exit. This is about the return of the disease that infected this franchise for seven straight seasons heading into the lockout, and the need to eradicate it immediately.
This is about the horrendous example being set for young guys such as Michael Del Zotto, Marc Staal, Matt Gilroy, Artem Anisimov, Ryan Callahan and Brandon Dubinsky, who exist in a vacuum of accountability and in a room that’s mute.
A year ago, people mistakenly fingered the professorial and articulate Renney as the root cause of the Rangers’ lack of emotion. Now, with the polar opposite in temperament behind the bench, the Rangers are utterly non-responsive. John Tortorella’s screaming goes in 22 ears and out the 22 others. The team plays hard when it is easy.
Band-Aids cannot heal the total eclipse of the heart that ails the Rangers. Sather now must deconstruct what he thought he had constructed over the last two summers and begin again. If he or Dolan think that it looks bad having Redden, Rozsival and Brashear in Hartford, then they don’t get how much worse it looks with them on the ice in New York.
In other words, out of sight, out of mind is preferable to being reminded every night that the GM was out of his mind signing that trio to the deals he did, isn’t it?
Sather now has one mandate. It is to identify the players who will form the core of a future championship contender and weed out all the rest by whatever means necessary. The GM must begin immediately before the collateral damage destroys the impressionable youngsters who will comprise that nucleus.
When scratched for the first of two games before being mysteriously reinstated following two victories without him, Redden had the nerve to complain that Tortorella was making an example of him.
Now it’s time for Sather to set the example by waiving Redden, by waiving Rozsival, by waiving Brashear — who embarrassed himself on Wednesday by turning away from Daniel Carcillo — and replacing them with people who will try their best and whose view of the world isn’t through a rear-view mirror.
If Sather is not up to this task, he has outlived his usefulness as Rangers’ GM.