New York Rangers: Patience is important for Lias Andersson

In the dog eat dog world of professional sports, it’s always about what have you done for me lately. In the case of Lias Andersson, it’s not much.

In the course of rebuilding, a team is bound to go through a large number of players. It’s experimenting in practice as the front office gives the coaching staff pieces to use and the staff subsequently tries to find a working formula. In the scale of time, a 20-year-old piece has plenty of time in terms of development.

That’s where the constant second-guessing of the Lias Andersson selection in the 2017 entry draft becomes ridiculous. The Swede is only 20-years-old and far from being a bust. Player development is not a linear process with the same benchmarks for every individual.

Take Chris Kreider’s three-year odyssey of pinballing back and forth between Hartford and New York. Although it took the right coach and situation to get the most out of Kreider, the point still remains. Every individual is different and requires a different type of approach in terms of motivation.

Some players need a rah-rah in their face coach pushing their buttons to annoy them into playing better and others need instruction from a teacher.

It’s all relative, understand the fact that of the 24 players selected after Andersson only five have more games played at the NHL level. First round picks are selected high in the draft for their potential and Andersson is a certain type of player. The Swede is a leadership, intangibles and bowling shoe ugly style of play type of player.

Time and more time

The big thing to keep in mind is that the Rangers’ organizational goal is not to win every single night right now but to get better and work towards a better future. There are always growing pains and rarely instances in which a franchise can avoid losing before it can get better.

There is no right way to go about building a team, but there are certain necessary decisions. The addition of prospects like Andersson to the fold at the expense of proven veterans like Derek Stepan. That was a necessary move and something that any rationally acting general manager would have done.

The Rangers are a young team with all of the time in the world ahead of them. The final 49 games this season are a proving ground for those players who need further seasoning.

That’s where the craziness of obsessing over what could have happened in a draft less than two years ago doesn’t make sense. Of the 31 first round picks from that draft, only four players have established themselves as above average at the NHL level.

Yet, because Ranger fans don’t know how to handle losing, they’re going crazy about Casey Middelstadt of the Buffalo Sabres, who by the way, has a whopping 15 points in 41 games. Not exactly the second coming of Wayne Gretzky up in Western New York.

Andersson has played a grand total of 25 games at the NHL level. That’s not a sufficient sample size to rule one way or another on the Swede’s future. Simply put, the forward needs more time to grow and seize a bigger role in the lineup. In his limited fourth line role, Andersson has played perfectly fine, he just has not excelled.

Given time, the Swede will round into form and keep getting better. It’s not about today or tomorrow, it’s about four years from now.