In rating the Rangers’ front office, fans are fickle

It has certainly been a tumultuous postseason for the New York Rangers.  An entirely revamped front office, a new coach and assistants along with six new players, all since Tom Wilson decided to use Artemi Panarin as a punching bag at Madison Square Garden.  We’ve seen favorite players traded, unconventional draft picks and the final kick in the gut, the death of Rod Gilbert.

The Athletic (subscription required) just published their annual ranking of NHL front offices, based on voting by fans.  You have to subscribe to The Athletic to read the entire article, but suffice to say, the Rangers didn’t do well, dropping from fifth to 23rd overall.

There is nothing to be surprised about when it comes to how the fans voted.  The fear factor is when it comes to Glen Sather and James Dolan and their influence on Chris Drury’s decision-making.  The frustration is in the team’s apparent overreaction to the Tom Wilson incident, sacrificing skill for muscle.   So, is it justified or was the fanbase too forgiving when it came to the former regime?

Why a change was needed

Let’s be frank about the Davidson/Gorton era.  Yes, they made a lot of good decisions and had the team on the right track, but it wasn’t all peaches and cream.  Sather and Gorton made the right call, deciding to rebuild and being open about it.  It was needed and that February 2018 letter was probably the best thing they did.

Trades have been a mixed bag. The only sure fire home runs have been the haul they got for Rick Nash, the theft of Ryan Strome for Ryan Spooner and getting Mika Zibanejad.  While getting Adam Fox for two second round picks sounds like a great deal, remember that Fox had no desire to play for any other NHL team and was willing to go back to Harvard for one more year in order to gain unrestricted free agency.  He was always going to end up a Ranger.

Bad deals?  The McDonagh deal is looking worse with every Cup won by the Lightning. If Nils Lundkvist doesn’t become a star, that one will be a disaster.   The trade with Arizona went south this season with the DeAngelo fiasco.  Gorton gave up too much in the Trouba deal.  Trading Mats Zuccarello, Kevin Hayes and Michael Grabner hasn’t netted the team much. He gave away Ryan Graves.

Let’s not forget that Gorton traded future assets for Eric Staal and Brendan Smith.

The draft

As for the draft, a can of beans would have drafted Alexis Lafrenière and Kaapo Kakko.  Gorton deserves no credit for winning the lottery.  He does have to take responsibility for drafting Lias Andersson and Sean Day and for going off the board to pick Vitali Kravtsov ninth overall.  The jury is out on that one.

in five years we can all sit down and grade the rest of his non-lottery first and second round draft picks including K’Andre Miller, Filip Chytil, Olof Lindbom, Matthew Robertson, Nils Lundkvist, Karl Henriksson, Braden Schneider and Will Cuylle.

Contracts

Let’s talk about contracts.   $11.6 million a year for Artemi Panarin is probably the right pre-COVID number, but it isn’t if his play is deteriorating when the team is ready to really contend for a Stanley Cup.  If 2023-24 is the year, he will be 31 years old.  That should work.

Giving Chris Kreider and a seven-year $45.5 million contract now looks like a bad call, but who knew they would get Lafrenière ? Still, that pre-pandemic contract will probably come back to haunt the team.  Jacob Trouba’s 7-year $56 million deal is also a pre-pandemic overpay, but he was younger than Kreider and has a better long term upside.

Gorton was getting kudos for managing to the cap,but it isn’t that difficult when you have the youngest team in the league and we’ll know the real story when those young stars need to get paid and the team has committed almost one fourth of their cap space to Kreider and Trouba. It’s Drury’s problem now and it resulted in the trade of Pavel Buchnevich.  While the return for Buchnevich is on Drury, the fact that he had to go rests on the former regime.

Coaching

Finally, let’s talk about coaching. While Alain Vigneault wasn’t getting much love from the fanbase, he did guide the team to the Stanley Cup Final.  His departure was overdue and it was a no-brainer for Gorton, especially after  Vigneault’s bizarre post-mortem on the 2017-18 season.

Was David Quinn the right choice?  Ask ten Ranger fans and you will get ten different answers.  A consensus is impossible and it may take a full season of Gerard Gallant to know if Quinn had helped or hurt his young players.

The only undeniable fact is that of all the #1 forward picks who made the jump directly to the NHL since the lockout, Alexis Lafrenière had the second lowest goals and points per game average in his rookie season with only Jack Hughes posting inferior numbers.  Rasmus Dahlin and Aaron Ekblad, two defenseman, produced more points per game than the Ranger rookie.

Of all the #2 forward picks who made the jump directly to the NHL since 2005,  Kaapo Kakko produced the fewest goals per game and the second lowest points per game with only Tyler Seguin with fewer.

We can blame COVID-19 or the challenge of breaking into a more talented lineup, but one of the biggest issues for Rangers fans was Quinn’s deployment of his youngsters.

Schizophrenia

And that brings us to the biggest issue with the Gorton/Davidson regime.    The rebuild got off to the right start, but descended into schizophrenia after a year.   Right after the Davidson was hired in the spring of 2019, he was talking more about a “build” instead of a rebuild.  Then they went out and signed Artemi Panarin and traded for Jacob Trouba.

Combine that with Quinn’s overplaying his veterans at the expense of ice time for the kids and his “making the playoffs is everything” mantra and there is small wonder that the rebuild went slightly off the tracks.

Toughness

Ironically, the biggest misjudgement by Davidson and Gorton was what got them fired.  They did a good job in putting together a young and skilled team, but what they didn’t do was mold a team that was built for the playoffs.   That was obvious in the team’s embarrassing ouster in the 2020 Stanley Cup Qualifier and was reinforced when they were manhandled by the Islanders and Capitals last season.

After the Stanley Cup Qualifier, Gorton and Davidson’s big move to deal with that issue was to trade up to draft Braden Schneider.  Sure, they got a “hard to play against” prospect, but he won’t be in the NHL for two or three years.  Then they went out and signed Colin Blackwell, Kevin Rooney, Jonny Brodzinski and Tony Bitetto.  Fine human beings, but not what they needed.  To make matters worse, they disposed of two of their feistiest players in Tony DeAngelo and Brendan Lemieux.  When Brendan Smith is your answer to Tom Wilson, you are in trouble.

So, are they better off?

The jury is out on Chris Drury and the early  returns are uniformly negative (if you believe The Athletic’s unscientific survey).  According to fans, here are the mistakes Drury has made so far:

• Overreacting to the Wilson incident by getting Ryan Reaves, Barclay Goodrow, Sammy Blais and Dryden Hunt
• Overpaying Barclay Goodrow and for too long
• Getting a horrible return for Pavel Buchnevich
• Giving up on the rebuild too soon in a desperate desire to make the playoffs to appease the owner

However, if you had taken a survey of fans after the season ended, here would have been the top issues facing the Rangers:

• Lack of toughness
• Bottom six depth and grit
• Coaching
• Improper deployment of young forwards
• Inability to win faceoffs

Since the season ended, Drury has taken care of four of the five issues.  His hiring of Gerard Gallant has been uniformly applauded.  By trading Buchnevich he has opened up slots for his trio of young prospects (Lafrenière, Kakko, Kravtsov).   The bottom six will be better, tougher, grittier and more entertaining that last year’s version.

He still has a lot on his plate including contract extensions, salary cap considerations and he is still building his organization. But to rate the team’s front office in the bottom third of the NHL is another example of the fickleness of Ranger fans and the knee jerk reaction we have to every single move the team makes.

Seriously, were we really willing to sit back and let last year’s team play the same way this season?  Does anyone believe that Davidson/Gorton would have made the moves that Drury made including firing David Quinn and revamping the lineup?

The bottom line is the Rangers got their butts kicked two years in a row.  The Carolina Hurricanes in 2020 were better coached and better prepared for playoff hockey.  Don’t forget, no one retaliated for Brady Skjei’s hit on Jesper Fast.

The Tom Wilson incident was nothing less than a humiliation. An opposing player beat up the Rangers’ best player and openly mocked the Blueshirts and he did it at Madison Square Garden.

It’s easy to blame the drop in the rankings on what Chris Drury has done so far this offseason, but if Davidson and Gorton were still in charge, does anyone think that they would deserve to be ranked as one of the NHL’s best?  Let’s see how Drury does this first year and revisit this in a year.  He has moved quickly and he is not done yet.   One more thing.  When Drury became the GM, he was the only frontline person in the organization with a Stanley Cup ring.  He knows what it takes to change that.

What do you think?  Confident they are on the right track or on the road to mediocrity?