Rangers continue to pay a price for winning the Cup

Neil Smith, the general manager of the Rangers, has a good analogy to emphasize the cycles clubs go through as they build and rebuild their rosters.

"We're caught on a Ferris wheel," he says. "We got to the top, thankfully, in 1994. But the Ferris wheel kept turning, and no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't get them to let us stay on top. The Ferris wheel has to turn."

Are the Rangers on a joy ride back to the top? Stuck a few hundred feet off the ground? Left at the bottom? The Rangers' makeup, Smith acknowledges, "is not at all the way I want it, but it's not a team I don't like.... I've been able to keep my supper down."

But he's probably better off not eating more hot dogs and cotton candy before he gets back on that wheel again.

Smith, whose nine-year tenure is the longest for any Rangers G.M. since Emile Francis' reign from the 1964-65 season to 1976, is still paying for the Rangers' 1994 Stanley Cup victory. Because Smith traded many promising youngsters for veterans in an all-out push to end a 54-year Cup drought--and continued to add proven players in an attempt to remain competitive--the Rangers are one of the NHL's older teams and haven't been able to replace players who aged or moved on.

Smith has no quarrel with the notion that winning the Cup came at a high cost. However, he looks at the years of prosperity that proceeded and followed that glorious season and believes the Rangers and their fans got good value.

"The Stanley Cup is the culmination of years of work and the epitome of years of work," Smith says. "We're paying for winning the President's Trophy in 1992 and the President's Trophy and Stanley Cup in 1994. We're paying for trying to take a shot at the Stanley Cup in the lockout year, 1995, and trying to take a shot when we were fifth overall in 1996. All those years, it took some sort of currency to bring in players like Mark Messier, Mike Gartner, even Bernie Nicholls, Steve Larmer.... We won it, and you want to repeat because you feel you owe the organization.

"When I got on the Ferris wheel, I got on at the bottom, in 1989. When I got here, the Rangers had (in the previous season's playoffs) gone out in four straight to Pittsburgh, and it was coming up on the 50th anniversary of the last Cup. You get Nicholls and Gartner and end up with Messier, and you're favored. Through a lot of shenanigans that went on, we won the Cup (in '94) and we thought we'd still have a shot the next couple of years. You owe it to your fans to try."

Winning the Cup cost him Tony Amonte, who developed into one of the league's most productive right wings after being traded to Chicago for Stephane Matteau and Brian Noonan in March, 1994. Winning cost Todd Marchant, the speedy center who was dealt to Edmonton in March 1994 for Craig MacTavish. And it cost Doug Weight, who was traded to Edmonton for Esa Tikkanen in March 1993. Weight has become a premier center--and don't think Smith doesn't know it, especially with his team thin at center after the retirement of Pat LaFontaine. His only proven, natural center is Wayne Gretzky, who will be 38 in January and is averaging a hefty 28 minutes per game.

"If we had never traded Doug Weight, we'd have Gretzky and Weight as our top two centers," Smith says, "and we wouldn't have the Stanley Cup."

In the first two years after the Rangers' Cup victory, Smith traded power-play standout Sergei Zubov and Petr Nedved to Pittsburgh for Luc Robitaille and Ulf Samuelsson; he later traded Robitaille for Kevin Stevens, who has been an expensive bust. Smith let Noonan go to St. Louis as a free agent and later reacquired Noonan for Sergio Momesso; he traded Matteau to St. Louis for Ian Laperriere, then traded Laperriere, talented Swedish defenseman Mattias Norstrom, centers Ray Ferraro and Nathan LaFayette and a mid-round draft pick to the Kings for Marty McSorley, Jari Kurri and Shane Churla in March, 1996.

None of the players Smith got in that last deal is still with the Rangers. Norstrom has matured into a solid, top-four defenseman, and Ferraro, Laperriere and LaFayette have been valuable to the Kings. "One of my biggest blunders ever," Smith says of trading Norstrom, "but we were trying to put it together to win. Norstrom was the last young player we traded. We didn't want to do it then, but forces were such that we had to.

"You get to the point where your people start to expire on you. The shelf life on the packaging wears out, and here we are today, without a $75 million payroll."

The patience of Rangers fans, who have been remarkably loyal over the years, is wearing thin. They were so euphoric over the 1994 Cup they almost didn't mind losing in the second round of the playoffs each of the next two seasons. The sign, "Now I Can Die Happy," one fan held up at Madison Square Garden after the Rangers won the Cup summed up their sentiments. The Rangers had sort of a bye the next few seasons, but that tolerance has waned in the wake of the ill will that followed Messier's departure as a free agent and last season's nonplayoff finish.