I understand the business of hockey. And after 50+ years of being a Ranger fan, I certainly am familiar with heartbreak (1972!) and years of rotten or mediocre teams. As of right now, color me skeptical about the ability of this franchise to finally figure out the magic formula. Trading for "futures" is fine,a long as the future becomes the present.
We'll have to wait and see how the future plays out. But, one thing I do know is that hockey is a game that's all about heart. The Rangers lost a piece of their heart in the Zucc trade-- I'm not sure they will be able to get it back so quickly.
And that’s fine, I get that.
But I have yet to see someone offer up a viable alternative to at least trying to stock up on young talent.
This team was aging, becoming more frail, getting diminishing returns, and had surrendered a lot of depth for that 2012-2016 window.
I think there’s a tendency to view a rebuild as a team’s preferred method. The truth is that no team likes to rebuild. They’d much rather be able to keep band together — for many of the reasons you just cited. They’re all true.
Unfortunately, at some point it usually becomes apparent that you can’t keep doing that. Ultimately it comes down to a question of “when” to do it.
Guys like McD, Zucc, Nash, etc. weren’t going to get any better. They weren’t going to get any younger. And the odds of them gaining value was pretty slim.
So you swallow hard, try to maximize the value you can get, while there’s still value to be had, and you attempt to move forward.
This wasn’t the 1988 Oilers we’re breaking up, this wasn’t a team that had one or two more runs in it.
If we didn’t do it now, we’d have to do it next year, or the year after. And the returns we’ve received in 2018 and 2019 would be even less. And unlike right now, we wouldn’t even have the possibility of guys like Kravtsov or Miller or many of the other names that at least stand a chance of having a long-term impact in 2024.
A rebuild isn’t about risk aversion. It’s about applied risk in the face of adversity.