New York Rangers: What price loyalty?
When Mats Zuccarello torched the New York Rangers in a recent interview in Norway, it refocused attention on the team’s treatment of Henrik Lundqvist. It isn’t a pretty situation.
From Mats Zuccarello’s comments in his recent interview, it appears that some players have as romanticized a view of their relationship with professional sports team as their fans do. The Norwegian actually believed that because he signed a multi-year contract for less money than he could have made on the open market, the team would reward him for bailing them out of an ugly cap situation.
“Now you see that being nice to a club, or taking less pay because you are loyal, turns out to be just nonsense….Everything was going to be fine and great, but then the management decides, and then you are not worth a s–t.” – Mats Zuccarello, April 2020
Those are pretty harsh words and shows just how bitter Zuccarello is towards Rangers management. You can be sure that when Henrik Lundqvist finally opens up about his treatment long after his Rangers career is over, he will have similar feelings.
The reality
The Zuccarello and Lundqvist situations are completely different. As a forward, the Rangers had the option of keeping him and reducing his playing time or shifting him to a different line. He could have stayed with the team in a different role.
As far as Lundqvist goes, the team has far fewer options. In reality an NHL team can only carry two goalies. With Igor Shesterkin the Rangers have their goaltender of the future, the next Lundqvist. Faced with a decision between a 24-year old Alexandar Georgiev on an entry level contract or a 38-year old legend who is clearly past his prime and is making $8.5 million a year, the team had to make a choice.
All reports are that the Rangers dangled Georgiev as trade bait at the deadline, but as much as Ranger fans don’t want to hear it, the market was not there. Georgiev has played well, but to be honest, decent backup goalies are not a rarity in the NHL and they weren’t going to give him away.
Still, considering age and salary, the team has decided to go with a Shesterkin-Georgiev tandem and it’s hard to argue against that.
Cap considerations
The salary cap is the prime culprit in all of these scenarios. At $8.5 million, Lundqivst is just too expensive to keep around. A buyout is inevitable and it will free up the cash the team needs to pay some of their young stars.
The cap played a role in Zuccarello’s departure. At $4.5 million he would have been seeking a raise on an extension two summers ago and that was just not going to happen. The team couldn’t afford it. There’s no telling if he would have been willing to sign a multi-year deal for a nominal increase in pay so he could end his career as a Ranger, but it doesn’t matter, they couldn’t have done it anyway.
There’s also no way of knowing what they told Zuccarello when he signed that team-friendly deal in 2015. Did they intimate that he would be a Ranger for life? Did they promise a bigger payday when the contract expired? Only Zuccarello and Glen Sather know.
But it’s not just the salary cap. Teams make tough moves for other reasons.
Passing the torch
You cannot blame it all on the salary cap. When the Rangers waived Ed Giacomin in 1975, it was because they had anointed newly acquired 22-year old John Davidson as their goalie of the future and had sufficient backups in Dunc Wilson and Doug Soetaert
People forget when the Rangers cut him loose, Giacomin was 36 years old, had an 0-3-1 record and had allowed 19 goals in four games with a save percentage of .806. People forget that the previous year the Rangers had been shockingly ousted from the Stanley Cup Playoffs by the upstart New York Islanders with Giacomin in net for both losses (Gilles Villemure had the only win in the three game series).
Glen Sather was one of the last of the old time hockey general managers. As a former player and coach, he valued what a player had done for the team, rather than what they could do. There’s no doubt that his perspective about loyalty played a part in awarding those onerous contracts to Marc Staal and Dan Girardi. For that he has been vilified.
Jeff Gorton is one of the new breed of GM’s, who cut his teeth in the salary cap era. His tenure has been marked by a series of coldblooded moves.
- Trading team captain Ryan McDonagh
- Buying out Dan Girardi
- Signing Kevin Shattenkirk for a hometown discount and then buying him out
- Trading Mats Zuccarello
- Trading players like Kevin Hayes, Jimmy Vesey and Neal Pionk, who had chosen to sign with the Rangers and play in New York.
- Relegating Lundqvist to third man status in the goalie rotation
But, it’s not Gorton’s fault. It is what you have to do to succeed in the modern NHL. It’s why 22-year old’s are routinely being handed multi-year contracts worth millions after only a year or two in the league.
It’s also why players like Mats Zuccarello who actually believe that there is room for loyalty in the business known as NHL hockey are dead wrong.
So, who is to blame? It’s not the individual players like Zuccarello, Lundqvist, Hayes or Shattenkirk. It’s not the coaches or general managers who are jumping through hoops to stay under budget. Blame the NHL in its misguided belief that a salary cap is a good thing because it results in parity. Blame the NHL for disregarding the fans who have more loyalty to their teams than the players or management. And specifically blame Gary Bettman and the NHL Players Association for allowing it to happen.
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