Speculation: Roster Building thread: Part XIX (Thanks, Sam)

[DanielBrassard]

It’s called rebuilding . It’s our only hope.

Yeah, but that’s not what the crypto guy is calling for and that’s not what the GM’s plan is. If it was I’d be in favor of at least picking a direction. Instead Drury will attempt to rearrange the pieces while not acquiring the necessary talent needed to win.

 

[duhmetreE]

This team didn't make the trade for Miller with their eyes set on a rebuild next year.Expect another half-ass retool on the fly to fight for a Wildcard next year.Sad but true

We normally do well with a new coach.

It might be copium but with some lotto luck and solid trades/signings we could be contending

We’re so poorly coached.

 

[GoAwayPanarin]

Well we know where Kreider and perhaps Zibanejad are going.

 

[The Crypto Guy]

Yeah, but that’s not what the crypto guy is calling for and that’s not what the GM’s plan is. If it was I’d be in favor of at least picking a direction. Instead Drury will attempt to rearrange the pieces while not acquiring the necessary talent needed to win.

What am I calling for?

Cleaning out the garbage. Mika and Kreider.

What do you think Drury is going to look to do this summer?

 

[Machinehead]

They anticipate and act on that assumption. The Rangers sit back, read and react, and play like they met each other 5 minutes ago as they play zone offense or back up to the dots.

It's much, much more a coaching and player buy in issue than a talent issue. If they Caps played like the Rangers, they would look like the Rangers and vice versa. It's not Connor McMichael and Martin Ferahvary.

To say it's not a talent issue is ignoring the greatest goal-scorer in the history of the league who is in the middle of his 22-year prime. I mean, c'mon. Connor McMichael and Martin Ferahvary? That's disingenuous.

A lot of spooky nonsense is getting spoken about the culture over in DC, meanwhile, there's nothing particularly appealing about the way they play. They have first round upset written all over them.

And that's not to say buy-in isn't important. I do think our forwards are lazy and I do think they need to be held accountable.

All I'm saying is the Caps aren't a good example. They're a team that was an absolute mess 12 months ago that's now riding the last hurrah of a once-in-a-lifetime talent.

It's talent we don't have, and frankly Ovechkin is a talent most teams never will have, so "look what the Caps did with their buy-in" is not a viable path for us.

 

[KirkAlbuquerque]

Yeah, but that’s not what the crypto guy is calling for and that’s not what the GM’s plan is. If it was I’d be in favor of at least picking a direction. Instead Drury will attempt to rearrange the pieces while not acquiring the necessary talent needed to win.

how do you acquire the necessary pieces?

You need to swindle some other dumb GM which i don't thinkg Drury is able to do, or just get rid of your good but older and expensive players and just tank for the high picks, and try not to f*** them up this time.

 

[McRanger92]

Well we know where Kreider and perhaps Zibanejad are going.

Kreider+Mika for Zacha and Zadorov/Lindholm

 

[Machinehead]

how do you acquire the necessary pieces?

You need to swindle some other dumb GM which i don't thinkg Drury is able to do, or just get rid of your good but older and expensive players and just tank for the high picks, and try not to f*** them up this time.

I don't know how much we f***ed them up versus how much these guys were just Aaron Ekblad and Jonathan Drouin as opposed to MacKinnon and Barkov. Not every high pick hits. That's why you don't abort the rebuild and buy in the offseason coming off of a 32-win season.

We could have done better with Lafreniere and Kakko but you can't tell me these guys I've been watching for five years now were ever gonna be that good. They're just not it.

 

[McRanger]

The key for me is put together a team that can compete with a defense that can move the puck. I am not concerned about intangibles. Most of that is just nonsense.

Everything is viewed through the lens of winning.

If a team wins consistently, then they have a great culture and great leadership.

If they lose consistently, then they are a country club and rudderless.

Want a good culture? Win games. Probably the biggest country club situation this team has ever had was during Messier's 2nd stint. And The Captain was the captain. I don't think that team was particularly lazy, they just were not very good.

Like Crash Davis said, win 20 games in the show and you can grow fungus on your shower shoes and the press will call you colorful, dont win 20 games and your just a slob.

 

[AlternateSideParking]

The Rangers haven't had a legit top-10 pick hit for the organization since Brian Leetch in 1986. Notice how I said "hit" and and not "hit big". That's absolutely f***ing crazy to comprehend. It's been one disaster after another when it comes to high draft picks. That's why I want them to give Pittsburgh the pick or trade it for a bunch of Day 2 options, because that's the only place the damn team can find NHL talent. None of the players below took a step forward after they were supposed to help carry the team if the top veterans slowed down. That is incredibly hard to do considering the law of averages.

K. Miller -- regressed
Lafreniere -- regressed
Schneider -- regressed
Chytil -- regressed
Kakko -- regressed
Fox -- regressed
Lindgren -- regressed
Shesterkin -- regressed

The coach sucks balls, so maybe there's hope with a younger voice. Thank god Laviolette's gone and deservedly so. Clearly negative value for player development. Too early to tell if there's more than one game-changer from the incoming batch of Othmann, Berard, Edstrom, Perreault, Fortescue, Roobroeck, Sykora, and Garand. To me, these are all future support pieces at best, with only Perreault having a legitimate top-line ceiling. It's not a thin system, it just lacks explosive talent.

So the cycle likely continues. All the younger-ish guys will battle for middle-six/bottom-pair roles while ownership pressure the GM to replace the shitty overpaid big names with newer overpaid big names who will become shitty overpaid big names and booed within 2-3 years. I still think they rebound next year and win 45+, but that'll be mostly from Shesterkin's expected bounceback, Panarin playing out of his mind for a new contract, and the typical short-term uptick from hiring a new coach.

 

[Alluckks]

This is not who I chose as the core, this is who the team thinks is the core according to Brooks.

I'm not discounting anybody -- every team in the league has stars. If you think that group of six players is good, relative to what other teams can ice, you need to watch some more teams.

If the Rangers move on from Panarin (and I think they should) then they have a severe lack of talent in their top 6. Miller I think can be fine as your 2nd most talented forward. But after that the Rangers have guys who should be like your 5th best forward, maybe 4th best if they are having a particularly great year (like Trocheck last year for instance).

 

[RagFinMet]

They need to rebuild the Blueline
Sign Gavrikov and Provorov
Trade panarin, schneider for Clarke
Trade kreid, soucy for pics
Sign Bennett

Cuylle. JT. Zib
Perreault. Tro. Laf
Othmann. Bennett. Berard
Eds. Car. Rempe

Provorov. Clarke
Gavrikov. Fox
Jones. Borgen
Vaak

I can dream cant I?

 

[Machinehead]

If the Rangers move on from Panarin (and I think they should) then they have a severe lack of talent in their top 6. Miller I think can be fine as your 2nd most talented forward. But after that the Rangers have guys who should be like your 5th best forward, maybe 4th best if they are having a particularly great year (like Trocheck last year for instance).

It wasn't good enough when Panarin, Mika, etc. were part of the core.

We got so f***in cooked by Florida and tbh people shouldn't need to see us lose a bunch of regular season games for that to have been a wakeup call.

 

[bhamill]

Braden Schneider who is stuck on their 3rd pairing for the next 5 years behind will Borgen is in the core, but he wasn’t good enough to jump ahead of Borgen on the depth chart. I’d love to hear the Drury apologists make sense of that one, I really would.

Will f***in Borgen btw.

Wouldn’t that be Laviolette apologists? Drury isn’t making the lineup…

Anyway, who says that a 24 ear old Schneider won’t leapfrog a 29 year old Borgen next year? Or do it when they are 25 and 30 respectively? Why make the assumption that Schneider doesn’t move up in the next five years? I don’t get it.

 

[effen]

To say it's not a talent issue is ignoring the greatest goal-scorer in the history of the league who is in the middle of his 22-year prime. I mean, c'mon. Connor McMichael and Martin Ferahvary? That's disingenuous.

A lot of spooky nonsense is getting spoken about the culture over in DC, meanwhile, there's nothing particularly appealing about the way they play. They have first round upset written all over them.

And that's not to say buy-in isn't important. I do think our forwards are lazy and I do think they need to be held accountable.

All I'm saying is the Caps aren't a good example. They're a team that was an absolute mess 12 months ago that's now riding the last hurrah of a once-in-a-lifetime talent.

It's talent we don't have, and frankly Ovechkin is a talent most teams never will have, so "look what the Caps did with their buy-in" is not a viable path for us.

If you want to call the current iteration of Ovechkin, juiced to the gills and on enough EPO to choke a horse equivalent +/- 10% to Panarin I wouldn't go crazy arguing. Remove the two superlative talents from the equation.

The other 95% of the teams are the difference. If you swapped Panarin and Ovechkin the result is not the Rangers are in the playoffs (Panarin is demonstrably better!).

 

[kovazub94]

I'm not discounting anybody -- every team in the league has stars. If you think that group of six players is good, relative to what other teams can ice, you need to watch some more teams.

top-3 goalie, top-10 D. If you want to understand what I mean by "discounting" substitute Shesterkin and Fox for two top-10 forwards.

My other point was also about nuance - a player might not be a part of long-term core but simultaneously one of the better players in the league.

Anyway, the Rangers youth movement is not unlike what we've seen from the Caps - the Caps from two years ago...

 

[Machinehead]

top-3 goalie, top-10 D. If you want to understand what I mean by "discounting" substitute Shesterkin and Fox for two top-10 forwards.

My other point was also about nuance - a player might not be a part of long-term core but simultaneously one of the better players in the league.

Anyway, the Rangers youth movement is not unlike what we've seen from the Caps - the Caps from two years ago...

We're all so tired of hearing about the top-3 goalie and the top-10 D.

That's not enough and it gets trumpeted at any criticism of the roster.

 

[Machinehead]

If you want to call the current iteration of Ovechkin, juiced to the gills and on enough EPO to choke a horse equivalent +/- 10% to Panarin I wouldn't go crazy arguing. Remove the two superlative talents from the equation.

The other 95% of the teams are the difference. If you swapped Panarin and Ovechkin the result is not the Rangers are in the playoffs (Panarin is demonstrably better!).

I just think there should be a more sustainable model if we're gonna model after somebody.

The Caps are having their little run this year and that's gonna be it, like us last year.

Their only player worth half a f*** is 5,000 years old.

 

[Alluckks]

It wasn't good enough when Panarin, Mika, etc. were part of the core.

We got so f***in cooked by Florida and tbh people shouldn't need to see us lose a bunch of regular season games for that to have been a wakeup call.

I think if we had a better built defense then we could coin flip that series tbh

But also Mika, even at his absolute prime best, never was a 1C that you could win a cup with. He couldn't last 3 straight tough hard series, let alone how cooked he probably would have looked by series #4

 

[McRanger92]

Hire a coach that will preach accountability on defense and a culture that doesnt allow us to get pushed around on the ice.

Trade Kreider, Mika and Panarin

Elevate the young wings into the top 6 on powerplay

Use the cap space acquired from trading the vets to go after some D on the free agent or trade markets with high AAV short term contracts

Trade K'Andre for a young center which we desperately need

Bench any player who comes to camp out of shape. Looking at Bagel Boy and Bustfreniere specifically

This is a 1-2 year retool in my eyes. Rangers probably end up the 3 seed in the Metro next year if the guys who survive the purge play to their capabilities.

 

[Siddi]

What am I calling for?

Cleaning out the garbage. Mika and Kreider.

What do you think Drury is going to look to do this summer?

Mika is not going anywhere.

 

[Machinehead]

The fawning over the Caps reminds me of when we kinda sucked ass in 2023 and everyone was like "look how Seattle plays!" and I tried to tell you that team was a bunch of nothing. Look how that turned out.

"Don't go chasing waterfalls," they say.

Don't go chasing the sewage pipe either.

 

[AirGut]

Give me Mrtka at the #10
Devils had an awful regressive 23-24 season after a pretty good improvement the year they managed to beat us. They chose Anton Silyaev with their #10, Silyaev is 6'7", Mrtka is a 6'6" mobile D in the mold of Seider.
This team is in desperate need of someone like that to take the heat off of Fox, all because Miller never ended up becoming a true #2 like scouts had hoped.

 

[Clark Kellogg]

DFO did a 9 minute piece on the Rangers. I am not going to insult everyone here by posting it.
They showed next years defense and did not have Braden Schneider’s name listed and that was the least of the issues.
Garbage takes.

 

[kovazub94]

We're all so tired of hearing about the top-3 goalie and the top-10 D.

That's not enough and it gets trumpeted at any criticism of the roster.

The only criticism of the roster per se is a lack of true 1LD.

(Everyone and their aunt were betting on this roster minus JTM going to SCF after last playoffs with some targeted offseason moves)