eco's bones
Registered User
Torts didn't like the makeup of the team. He made that pretty clear pretty much the day he was hired. The only guys he really did like were Lundqvist, Staal, Girardi, Dubinsky, Callahan and maybe Drury. No. 1 on his hate list was Avery but it took him a couple-three years to get rid of Sean. Remember him going to the AHL for a spell though. I don't remember whether Naslund decided to forgo his final year of his contract before or after the Zherdev arbitration--that could have affected the Rangers decision on Nikolai too......but really Torts wanted to remake the team his way and had a certain amount of carte blanche and Zherdev would not have been a good fit. That might have factored into the Rangers decision not to sign him too. Back to Naslund--things were tight as far as cap--we had Drury, Gomez, Redden and Rozsival back then having signed big free agent deals and they were the contracts that in the next couple years the team tried to get rid of. Naslund's leaving gave us some relief for at least one year.