ALL right. Here are the questions. Some of them, at least.
A limited no-trade clause on top of $39M over six years to get Wade Redden to sign, a full no move on top of $8M over two years to get Markus Naslund to commit, and doesn’t it seem as if the Rangers are back to where they were before the lockout, bribing overpriced free agents to come to New York?
If the Rangers didn’t want to bring back Sean Avery, if he was such a destructive influence, why in the world did Glen Sather offer him a four-year contract for $12M?
What if Avery had come to the conclusion that $3M a year in New York was worth more to him than the $3.875M per for which he ultimately signed in Dallas?
What if he had taken the Rangers’ offer? Then what?
And again, if Sather indeed did want to sign him, how could $1M a year be the breaking point? You know what $1M is? It’s Patrick Rissmiller. That’s what it is.
Did Sather lose Avery so he could sign Rissmiller?
Really?
If the Rangers didn’t want to bring back Jaromir Jagr, why didn’t Sather tell him that face to face, rather than in a brief phone conversation some 20 minutes before the unilateral decision was announced on a conference call with the media?
Why in the world didn’t Sather schedule a meeting with Jagr in June so the general manager and captain could at least discuss their respective visions of the future?
Was this some kind of payback for Jagr’s yearlong public flirtation with Omsk that annoyed some Rangers when it continued into April, but was really only Jaromir being Jaromir?
And if the Rangers did want to sign No. 68, what, we’re supposed to believe Sather just forgot to tell him that while the GM was spending his money on everyone else the first three days of July?
If the Rangers don’t want Brendan Shanahan, don’t you think that Sather would tell him that face-to-face instead of delivering exactly the opposite message in conference calls with the media, if not to Shanahan himself, either directly or indirectly?
Are we supposed to believe that Shanahan at $2M (Slap Shots’ hypothetical number, not anyone else’s) doesn’t have value worth at least the combined investment of Rissmiller and Dan Fritsche or Fredrik Sjostrom?
What’s the worst that could happen if Shanahan has a bad training camp and/or first six weeks of the season. That he would be released?
Again, how come players who had bad years other places, like Naslund, Redden and Dimitri Kalinin, get the benefit of the doubt from Sather, but Shanahan doesn’t?
Where is this great respect for these all-time players that Sather promised and boasted about during a chat with a pair of writers at the Entry Draft in Ottawa?
Would Sather ever have treated Mark Messier this way (rhetorical question)?
What happened to all these allegedly great draft picks from four and five years ago who should be ready to challenge for third- and fourth-line spots this fall but apparently aren’t, thus prompting Sather to sign people from other organizations for too much money as support personnel?
What happened to Tommy Pyatt and Brodie Dupont and Dane Byers and Billy Ryan, for instance? What’s happened to Greg Moore that he can’t be a low-cost, fourth-line winger?
What would happen, by the way, if Mats Sundin decides he wants to play in New York instead of accepting Vancouver’s standing $20M offer over two years?
How could the Rangers have had $15.55M in the cap bank to sign four free-agent defensemen, Redden, Kalinin, Michal Rozsival and Paul Mara, but never get around to making an offer to Brooks Orpik?
If Marc Staal, whose omission from the NHL all-rookie team was a reflection of utmost ignorance, by the way, becomes the stud defenseman over the next two years everyone anticipates, why the need for Redden and Rozsival?
What team spends $4M to sign two third-pair defensemen, anyway?
If 2004 – which was easy, except for the Brian Leetch trade – was a purge, then what exactly is this . . . other than a mystery?
Why are the three dominant personalities of the last two seasons – Jagr, Shanahan, Avery – gone? And don’t try to pretend it’s about money.
You don’t really expect the findings of the IIHF as they apply to the disputed contract status of Alexander Radulov and Nikolai Filatov to be binding on either the NHL or the Russian KHL, do you, because they won’t be.
So is it safe to go out now for all those ignoramuses who were ready to walk the sidewalks with sandwich boards declaring, “The End is Near,” if the final event held at the current Yankee Stadium had been a hockey game?
Finally, does anyone sense that Slap Shots has major issues with Sather’s performance since the end of the playoffs.