New York Rangers: Does having a front office succession plan matter?

For nearly 20 years, Glen Sather has been at the helm of the New York Rangers’ organization. If and when the hockey lifer decides to retire, will the organization have a problem?

The previous ten years of New York Rangers’ hockey has been an outright treat. Although the team never captured Lord Stanley’s Cup, the organization was a perennial contender, made a cup final run and appeared in three different conference final. Sure, a cup victory eluded the franchise but it takes luck to win a championship in any sport.

This was in stark contrast to the first decade of the 21st century. Those Rangers were a Frankenstein monster of overpaid and over the hill veterans that could not compete with the juggernauts of the league at the time like the Detroit Red Wings. The 2001 Detroit team featured seven future Hall of Famers at the tops of their respective games.

New York had lineups featuring post double knee surgery Pavel Bure, perpetually concussed Eric Lindros, 40-year-old Mark Messier and other standouts from the 90s. The point is that those teams were an unmitigated disaster that finished near the bottom of the league over and over again due to a lack of understanding where the league was trending.

Known for his trademark cigar, Glen Sather was the do it all hockey mind for an uninterested James Dolan. Unlike the other tenants of Madison Square Garden, the New York Knicks, the Rangers have avoided Dolan’s interest because of hockey’s place in the American pecking order.

Since the team’s owner has largely been uninvolved in the management of the team, Sather has had run of the place for most of this millennia. While it took the better part of a decade for Sather to understand how to be successful in the modern league, he put together the foundation of the current team.

While just Jesper Fast, Henrik Lundqvist, Marc Staal, Chris Kreider and Mats Zuccarello remain from the 2014 cup final team, Sather was also the one who poached the team’s current G.M. Jeff Gorton from the Boston Bruins.

After a few years serving as an assistant, Gorton was promoted to Sather’s old job while the jefe himself moved to President of the team. The two have been in these jobs since the summer of 2015 and had to change the direction of the organization from contender to rebuilding in hopes of self-preservation.

At 75 years old, Sather will keep his job in the organization as long as he wants. This leaves the obvious question: Will Gorton move up the ranks and appoint his own heir. The likely candidate is Chris Drury who the Buffalo Sabres wanted to interview to run their team but the Rangers did not make the former captain available.

The looming problem for the organization is the ticking time bomb in Dolan. Everyone on the planet earth knows how badly the Cablevision heir micromanages the Knicks so the same could happen to the Rangers. If Sather isn’t around to keep Dolan in check his hockey team could join the basketball one as a laughing stock.

Successful people like Dolan who didn’t have to work for their wealth rarely are able to build off of what they already had. While the hockey team’s front office is firmly entrenched with a multi-year plan in the works, anything can happen in life. All of Gorton and Sather’s hard work could be erased by the hockey Isiah Tomas.

Often front office personnel don’t get to plan out their personal future, Gorton and Sather can secure their legacies. All of the work in rebuilding from the ashes of a contender should not be erased by outside stupidity.