New York Rangers: Ranking the success of the past five trade deadlines
The New York Rangers have been perennial Stanley Cup Contenders for the better part of a decade. Being a contender means being active at the trade deadline.
This year’s Rangers team is an outlier. The team probably will not make the playoffs and will be selling at the trade deadline. Neither of those has been true in New York for quite some time. In fact, making moves at the deadline has often bolstered the team’s playoff push.
Not only do the Rangers make a move at the deadline every year, they have made a splash. Of course, not every move has paid off. There is no exact science to making moves at the deadline, but the biggest key would be to limit risk.
In the case of New York, they’ve always been trading for proven veterans which are known quantities. When you follow the degrees of separation from these trades you see just how much they shape the Rangers current roster.
Here are the last five trade deadline for the Rangers, ranked in order of success.
The Veteran center of the Carolina Hurricanes was traded to the Rangers and never made a mark during his brief tenure.
This was the case of Jeff Gorton trying to force a square peg in a round hole. The move seemed impulsive when it was made and looks even worse when held up under closer inspection. The veteran center cost the Rangers Aleksi Saarela and two second-round picks. That price tag for a player who was in the midst of one of the worst seasons of his career was absurd.
Even worse for the Rangers was the fact that once Staal arrived in New York, Head Coach Alain Vigneault did not know where to play him. Although he had been a center for the entirety of his NHL career to that point, Vigneault insisted on playing him as a wing on the third line. It is no wonder that Staal failed to accomplish anything of note in his twenty games as a Ranger.
With two Staal brothers in the Rangers’ lineup, the only thing they accomplished was a first-round exit against the eventual Stanley Cup Champion Pittsburgh Penguins. In that series, Staal was a minus-seven with only seven shots in five games.
This trade was an absolute failure for the Rangers and that’s before knowing what Saarela and Luke Martin, the one second-round pick the Hurricanes kept develop into. Should either Saarela or Martin develop into solid NHL talent, the Rangers will look back on this trade with shame.
In a season and a half since joining the Rangers, Brendan Smith has been a real Jekyll and Hyde.
Going off of Smith’s time with the Rangers last season following the trade deadline, this deal was a steal. New York acquired the five-year veteran out of the University of Wisconsin for a second and third-round pick. This move paid immediate dividends as Smith was a shot suppressing darling during last year’s playoffs.
However, this season, Smith was so bad he got sent down to the AHL to figure things out. The biggest difference between his performance this year and last year is his level of confidence with the puck. Last season with Brady Skjei as his defensive partner, he was strong in the corners and played with an edge. This year, he panicked almost every single time the puck was on his stick.
The Rangers re-signed Smith last summer which was a gamble. At the time, it made a lot of sense. The brief sample the team got out of the former Badger was exactly what the team needed out of a second pair defenseman.
This deal did pay off in the short term which is why I rank it above the Staal trade. However, if the veteran defenseman never figures it out and needs to be buried in the AHL like a modern Wade Redden this trade will be worse than Staal.
The veteran puck-moving defenseman cost the Rangers an arm and a leg. In his year and a half, he proved he was worth the price tag.
The Rangers were in desperate need of a shot in the arm to their power play unit. The Dan Boyle experiment was not working and Ryan McDonagh was not well suited to quarterbacking the unit. So, this prompted New York to go out and land the biggest prize at the 2015 trade deadline.
Keith Yandle was mired out in the desert on a bad Arizona Coyotes team that was needed an overhaul. The Rangers sent top prospect Anthony Duclair, veteran John Moore, a first-round pick and a second-round pick to the desert for Yandle and other assets.
Following the move, Yandle was played sparingly on the Rangers third defensive pair alongside Kevin Klein. In 21 games that season he had 11 points with an average of 19:56 minutes per game. The following season he took on a bigger role with the team and got to play a more important role as well as time on the first power-play unit.
Although the Rangers did not achieve their goal of winning the Stanley Cup with Yandle on the team, the trade was a success. The Coyotes have since moved on from both Duclair and Moore and traded one of the two picks they acquired. In retrospect, the Rangers did not give up as much as it seemed at the time.
The future Hall of Famer finished his career with two solid seasons in New York.
The New York Rangers went to the Stanley Cup Final in 2014 and it would not have been possible without this trade. Of course, Martin St. Louis was only willing to waive his no-movement clause to come to the Rangers and it made the relationship strong. The veteran had been living in the offseason in Connecticut and wanted to be able to spend more time with his family.
Following an ugly spat with Steve Yzerman, the General Manager of the Lightning and Team Canada for that Olympic cycle St.Louis forced his GM’s hand. On March 6th the Rangers acquired St. Louis and a second round pick for Ryan Callahan, a second-round pick and a conditional second-round pick that became a first.
On a young Rangers team that was waiting to boil over, the veteran winger was just what the team needed. Although they had no official captain, Brad Richards and St.Louis led the team on the ice. It took the Laval native a little while to find his groove in New York, but once he did, the team never looked back.
The team rallying around St. Louis following the sudden loss of his mother pushed them over the Penguins in round two of that year’s postseason. Against the Canadiens, the three-time Lady Byng award winner scored the biggest goal of the series. His overtime game-winning goal in game four gave the Rangers a 3-1 lead in the series which they would win in six.
This trade could not have gone any better for New York. When looking back on it four years later, the Rangers look far and away the winners. The team avoided giving Callahan a pricey long-term extension that he could never live up to and got a few bounces away from winning a Stanley Cup.
This trade was five years ago and the Rangers have since moved on. However, this is the move that started this extended run of success.
At face value, the Rangers trading Marian Gaborik to the Columbus Blue Jackets for depth seemed puzzling. Less than a year earlier New York had sent Brandon Dubinsky and Artem Anisimov to Columbus for Rick Nash. Was the team going to win with star power or four balanced lines?
Picking up Derick Brassard along with Derek Dorsett and John Moore for an aging star that had fallen out of favor with the coach was an amazing move. Surprisingly, as a player who had never played on a big stage, Brassard excelled in the big moments with the Rangers. In 59 playoff games with New York Brassard had 44 points.
During the team’s dramatic run to the 2014 Stanley Cup Final, he centered its best line. Along with Mats Zuccarello and Benoit Pouliot, the three combined for 35 points in 25 games. Although Pouliot would move on a year later, Brassard and Zuccarello remained a force together and were on team’s top line the following season.
Now, arguing the butterfly effect, is it possible that if the Rangers hold onto Gaborik they win the Stanley Cup with him in 2014? I mean it is possible, but not likely. This trade was far and away the best of all the Rangers deadline deals of the past five years.
Next: Did anouncing the rebuild help or hurt?
When the team felt like Brassard had run his course with the team, they were able to flip him for Mika Zibanejad. The long-term value of this trade will continue to pay off for years to come.