You haven't been through anything like that. Not even with the Mets.
You talk about not being satisfied with mediocrity. You know what I was satisfied with in 2002? Beating the Islanders. That was the highlight of my season. Not a SCF appearance, or a Derek Stepan OT winner in game 7, or knocking off Montreal. It was beating the Islanders in January.
Beating the Devils? You can forget that. I went five calendar years watching the Rangers not beat the Devils in a game. Five years. Sound like fun?
Nowadays we get mad that the team that finished 6th in scoring doesn't have enough offense. Papa Johns sponsors our three-goal games. You know who sponsored our three-goal games back then? The ****ing full moon because they happened twice a month.
I can vividly remember random regular season wins from 99, 2000, 2001. I was a little kid. That's how often we won - it was an event when we won a game.
We used to be on the national game on fox almost every weekend, and over the course of those six years, I think we won like five of those games, getting embarrassed on national tv, week in, week out.
There was one reason to keep coming back though. You don't remember Brian Leetch. Compared to Brian Leetch, Ryan McDonagh is the slime dripping out from underneath an alley dumpster. The guy was God. And we traded him. We traded God.
But surely, all my suffering was part of the process. We surely got a lot out of the constant lottery picks - 4th overall, 9th overall, 8th overall, 10th overall, 11th overall, 12th overall, and 6th overall in that order. Nope. We got GOD DAMN NOTHING out of it. Only one of those picks went on to even play a game for the Rangers.
The Leetch trade? What did we get back for God? Four guys who would never play for the Rangers, and a pick that turned into Lauri Korpikoski. Thanks for the memories, Brian.
In fact, only one single player -exactly one- drafted from 1998 to 2004 went on to become a major piece for the Rangers. Henrik Lundqivst. 7th round pick.
I'm so glad we had all those lottery picks. I'm so glad we traded our greatest ever player for more picks. I'm so glad we tanked for a 7th rounder. It turned into so much of substance. All the hype about rebuilding. Tank this and tear that down. The last time we rebuilt, I can count one, single, solitary FINGER what we got out of it.
And then we turned it around from the 2004 deadline to the start of the 2006 season. How? By bringing in Jagr, Straka, Nylander, Rozsival, and Malik. VETERANS who actually played in the NHL, so we could actually put a damn NHL team together.
I have seen the Rangers rebuild. It was a hopeless, funless, completely free of substance experience that left us WORSE OFF when we finished than when we started.
Don't tell me about the benefits of rebuilding until you've lived through a rebuild. Don't call this iteration of the Rangers "mediocre" until you've really been through something hard. What you've seen is ****ing Candyland in comparison. Until you've lived a rebuild, you have no idea how horrible it actually is and what a disaster it actually turns out to be.