I am just going to mention in here that I am not so sure about the Rangers signings of Scott Gomez and Chris Drury. Defenders of the deals can go on about how Gomez is younger than Nylander, has more potential and has won a Cup but the one priceless point is that Jaromir Jagr liked playing alongside Nylander. That simple. When we came out of the lockout Glen Sather got players that made Jagr happy and he played his best hockey since he left Mario's side. Now we get rid of one of the main people that he loved playing with.
I don't care if Gomez is going to turn into Adam Oates or Dale Hawerchuk or whoever, if these big ticket signings piss Jagr off, he could very well revert back to the player he was in Washington when he was unhappy and we will go right down the tubes to where we were in the late 90s. Yeah, we had Gretz and some other big ticket signings, but we had no chemistry and we went NOWHERE. Not to mention that signing Gomez and Drury to these insane contracts will certainly cause unrest among Henrik, Avery and Shanny as they have already proved their meddle in a Blueshirt and now Glen will try to lowball them to fit everyone under the cap ...
I see the doom and gloom because when we had a plan and went with it, things worked, even if I didn't agree with it. Glen was going to rebuild so we traded Leetch, the greatest American player ever. Fine. Glen wanted to build for the post-lockout NHL and do it around Jagr by signing seven Czech players, fine. Teams with North American flavour have won Cups, no team that had that many Euros, nor a Euro captain ever has. But I was willing to go with it, and it worked. Now let's blow it up by getting rid of one of the linchpins and go after the big ticket names? It doesn't seem like a plan, it seems like an attempt to grab headlines when we should be trying to grab the Cup.
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Scott,
I understand your concerns about disrupting the chemistry of the team. There's no question that Nylander displayed a blue-collar work ethic that made him into one of the more unsung Rangers. Not to mention how he gelled w/ Jagr which you already touched on.
What you don't give Sather credit for with these signings is that both players, especially Drury, have been winners throughout their career, and are the kind of players (again, esp. Drury) that don't mind getting their hands dirty and doing the little things that win games.
I think that if it were up to me, the Rangers would have taken a hybrid approach to the recent FA frenzy. Go out and sign Drury, but bring back Nylander b/c of the aforementioned fine work w/ Jagr. That said, the fact that Nylander is getting paid nearly $5 million is startling.
The bigger question I have is what the Rangers are going to do to improve their defense. As we saw in 2006, there are definciences in the No's 1 & 2 pairs.
That's all...for now.
Great stuff getting the NYR Blog going, looking forward to being an active participant.
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