Real journalism died with paywalls. It's all about clickbait and convincing people to pony up a few bucks
A big problem around this team has always been that these guys can get away with just not knowing much about what they are covering. Before pay-walls, we under Sather tried to win with playing 80s hockey during the trapping era which led to 7 years in a row without a play-off appearance at a time we litterary had a roster costing 2x as much as the other team. Our "cap hit" peaked at 80m when league average was what, 35m?, and we still missed the POs.
How many times were the coach, GM or leading players asked like, "
basically all other teams in this league are either trapping or playing an extremely tight system to limit the effectiveness of the trap, why are you not doing the same?" Why was this question not asked? Because everyone bought the notion that "
you cannot trap in NYC, the fans won't have it". Problem was that you couldn't win without "trapping", did fans in NYC prefer following the biggest humiliation in pro sports, missing the POs with an 80m roster, over seeing a successful trapping team? Of course not.
It was beyond dumb. We lost the puck in the neutral zone a ton since our transition game was super naive and stood no chance against the trapping teams, as a result we gave up a ton of odd man rushes. On the other hand, we never created any turnovers in the neutral zone, and as a consequence got no odd man rushes. They were tracking odd-man rushes at this point, and suddenly everyone could see that we got 2-3 odd man rushes and gave up 14-15. Sather and co went, oh we need to get more odd man-rushes, that comes from speed right? So we went out and got Russ Courtnall (a real speedster, say Athanasiou type, had like 99 in speed in EA Sports NHL 1998) and players like that.
Glen Sather's work during these years is easily among the worst ever any GM have put forth in the history of the NHL. Eventually it became super obvious that he had no feel whatsoever for the "modern game", look this is almost two decades ago, so with modern I am not referring to what we are seeing right now lol. After 03', the Hindenburgh, Titanic, Holocaust season of the NHL. Everyone was prepared to lynch Sather. Glen said something like "calm down, its not like I shot the Prime Minister of Canada". He really distanced himself from the team. Brought in a ton of experienced pro executives. Renney, Maloney, Schoenfield, top agents, ex. NHL coaches and many others, don't remember them all. When we made moves, he stayed away from the podium. He was the GM by title, not definitely not by position. Renney and Maloney does a tremendous job, and on a phoenix bird resurrgent level manage to over night actually turn us into a very potent team. Nobody wanted to come here. Crappy players took less to go elsewhere. Among the players nobody wanted, they built a team that wasn't half bad. Rozival from Pittsburgh, Malik, Nylander, Straka and so forth. An amazing feet reallly.
Booooom, "his" team is looking pretty good, all of a sudden Glen Sather reemerge from the shadows. He has seen Ozolinsh at the OGs, and clearly is a driving factor in getting him mid-season. All of a sudden its Sather at the podium, he is back being the GM. Then he basically drives through among the worst UFA signings during the cap era with Redden, Gomez and Drury before backing away again eventually leaving over to Gorton, first off the record then the GM title included.
So this is the "great hockey minds" everyone is lifting to the skies right now, and a little recap of what went on before pay walls.
