Since I won't watch preseason Monday Night Football on ESPN, I instead watched the Rangers Fan Favs game on MSG - the Leafs game early in the season where we continually blow leads and have to come through in a shootout.
None other than Mike Peca made some good defensive plays that led to Toronto goals in the game and I still think that the talk of the Rangers signing him this summer would be foolish. We signed an aging defensive forward who won faceoffs, his name was Brian Skrudland and it was in 1997 (and amazingly I can't even find a picture of him in a Rangers jersey so, as you can see, I used the second best thing - him beating on Lindros, lol).
Skrudland got a three year, $5 million contract and went on to play 59 games and put up 11 points on a horrid squad that wasted a 90 point season by Gretz - in the second to last tour of his career. That same season Marc Savard only saw action in 28 games and had six points. Once he left the Rangers and started seeing top ice time, he turned into one of the top playmakers in the league. He had 96 points for Boston last year ... Boston!
Skrudland was exentually dealt to Dallas in a package and we got Todd 'Heartbeat' Harvey, who was great for what he was, but the Rangers limited his ice time because he was ... young. The next season, 1998-99, John MacLean got a ton of ice time while Harvey didn't and Mac had 55 points in 82 games while Harvey had 28 points (and 72 pim) in 37 games. If youth had been served, who knows how Gretzky's last season would have ended????
To limit a young talent at the expense of an aging veteran is a fantastic blunder. Great teams need young legs to get through long seasons and let's face it, their youthful ignorance helps because they don't realize the implications of what is going on. This has been proven time and time again in NHL history, and last year was no different when the Ducks run to the Cup was powered by Ryan Getzlaf, Dustin Penner and Corey Perry. To think that a pair of old legs like Peca's will bring Lord Stanley to New York is foolish and would be a big mistake. And that's all I have to say about that, because I want to stand next to the Cup again, and I want it to be in the Garden next time!
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