Deep pockets, deeper trouble: the Rangers seemingly spend money and lose games proportionately. Can Glen Sather engineer a turnaround for this team?

Sporting News, The, Jan 13, 2003 by Jay Greenberg

After years of going around throwing coins at practically any player who would take them, the Rangers last summer signed the squarest peg on the board.

If Bobby Holik, one of the most competitive players in the NHL, wasn't an overdue fit for a team that had been too easy to play for and, more tellingly, too easy to play against, then general manager Glen Sather is the monkey's uncle, and fans six seasons removed from a playoff game at Madison Square Garden should cry out in submission.

Signing Holik for $45 million over five years was an unprecedented sum for a center who never had scored 30 goals or had 70 points. But Holik, a 6-4, 225-pound, two-time Cup winner and ultimate antidote for the opposition's biggest and/or best center, was supposed to be just what the doctor ordered.

Instead, the Rangers had to order the doctor when Holik reported to camp in what Sather says was disappointing physical condition, then suffered a groin problem that sidelined him for 18 games. Putting on that Blueshirt had turned Holik into Alexandre Daigle, just as it once had turned Mike Keane and Brian Skrudland, two respected bulls, into lost sheep.

Why does that always happen to the Rangers? Big money? Bright lights? Mean media? What keeps the franchise swirling down the toilet along with all the money it has thrown at players? Since last making the playoffs, in 1997, the Rangers have had either the highest or second-highest payroll in the NHL. This year, the best bang for their 69 million bucks seemingly would come from a shot that would put them out of another season of misery.

Joe Micheletti, an analyst on Islanders broadcasts and a former NHL player, says injuries to Pavel Bure and Brian Leetch are partially to blame for the team's current woes, "but the Rangers had the same problems when those players were in there."

"Their highs and lows are so dramatic, there is just too much there (to justify) those kinds of lows," he says. "When they are totally outworked and their best players become unnoticeable, that's not the fault of the G.M. and coach. That's players not taking responsibility."

This season the Rangers are responsible for paying Bure $10 million, Leetch $9.6 million, Holik $9.6 million, Petr Nedved $4.8 million, Darius Kasparaitis $4.1 million, Mike Richter $4 million, Mark Messier $3.9 million, Vladimir Malakhov $3.6 million and Eric Lindros $2.7 million, which could quadruple with attainable games-played bonuses. Even fourth-liner Sandy McCarthy ($1.3 million) and spare part David Karpa ($1.7 million) make more than $1 million.

With the exception of Leetch, all those players were brought in or re-signed by Sather, who once waved Edmonton's small-market banner for fiscal sanity. He now appears to be rolling in dough with a half-baked plan, trying to build a champion in a New York minute.

"No, he didn't get suddenly stupid when he went across the border," Micheletti says. "It only indicates there is a long way to go to building a base up."

And that is the root of the evil the Rangers have wrought upon NHL coffers: The Bagman Franchise hasn't developed enough of its own players, forcing the Red Wings, Stars, Avalanche, Blues and Flyers to pay increasing dollars to keep their best while the Rangers continue to prove you can't buy contention.

Holik says the Rangers' chemistry, which he observed from afar while playing for the Devils, is worse than he thought. Players weren't able to grow up with the team, coming to the Rangers later in their careers with families and other obligations. And opportunities to build camaraderie are further limited because the team is based in the low-travel East. Bure and Lindros are largely loners. Mark Messier, 41, whose leadership skills helped slay a 54-year-old dragon when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup in 1994, no longer can justify the minutes he is being given.

So a team that has three players--Leetch, Richter and Messier--with any recollection of success in New York, cycles its own failure better than the puck.

Panthers coach Mike Keenan, who overcame some of those inherent problems in coaching the Rangers to that 1994 Cup win, says his former team will make a run at the playoffs when Bure (knee) and Leetch (ankle) return in February.

Sather agrees but refuses to add himself to the list of the wounded, even if it appears that the man who built the greatest offensive machine in NHL history in Edmonton, then changed with the times and reassembled a fast, if starless, playoff team on a shoestring, suffered a bruised brain falling off the turnip truck.

That must have been where Sather found a head coach, Bryan Trottier, who never had run a bench, who plays Messier more than 18 minutes a game, who leveled a withering public criticism of underachieving winger Radek Dvorak ("He's scared") and criticized Bure's defensive indifference when Bure was one of the team's few plus players. Trottier, who also benched Lindros for taking penalties that looked a lot less stupid than the calls, is feeling his way, although not very well.