Crease, I had a very similar thought last night but you've articulated it far better than I would have. Outside of the Hart it's tough to make a big case for O'Connor over Gretz. The three reasons I think I have him down so low are:
1. he wasn't on the original list. Due to the "4 season" rule, we made a special case for Gretz to be added, which, subconsciously said to me that he shouldn't be here (silly, but a reason no less).
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3. His last 2 years were the start of the "dark era" which has left a large scar on the fanbase. No good came from the years 1998-2004. Yeah, this franchise has been through some horrid patches, but most of us don't go back that far so the most recent one holds a special place of horror.
Agreed on the first point. Not sure you can blame him for the third point. Not like he was responsible for the poor decisions that Neil Smith and then Glen Sather made. Though I can understand how that might color your perception of him looking back on it, since his time here overlaps with it.
I may have been a bit against the norm then. On the initial top 20 vote I submitted to you, I had Gretzky in the top 10 already (O'Connor 7th and Gretzky 8th). Still have Gretz top 10. Currently I have Gretzky and O'Connor sitting respectively at 8 and 9. Bottom line, to me, is there are a lot of guys behind them who do not have the greatest career span. If a guy had a good 6 or 7 years, but Gretz and O'Connor did much more in 3 and 4 seasons, the 6 season span simply isn't enough to give it to a guy on longevity. But for me I've had Gretzky and O'Connor top 10 since the get go and still do.
I was looking forward to the Gretzky discussion, since I’m torn between these two lines of thought. On the one hand, I don’t consider Gretzky a “Ranger,” since he was only here for three seasons, and the majority of his career was spent elsewhere. So it bothers me to have him listed on a top 10 list of all-time
Rangers centers. The way I got around this originally was putting him at 11 on my original list.
Now that a real decision needs to be made, however, the problem I keep running up against is that when you look at what he did while he was here, he did more for the organization than many of the other players we have considered throughout this process.
Gretzky absolutely dragged his team, kicking and screaming, into the third round of the playoffs in 96-97. Despite the 4-1 wins in the first and second round, those were both very close series that could have easily gone either way – and were both series that the Rangers started off poorly. Games 2 and Games 4 of the Florida series, he put the Rangers on his back. In the entire playoffs that year for the Rangers, Gretzky was held pointless in just three games (all in the first two rounds). They lost two out of those three games – and the two they lost they were shutout. What people also forget, is that despite Gretzky putting up a monster performance in the third round (9 points in 5 games), the only game that the Rangers managed to win was yet another in which he dragged them kicking and screaming to victory (and got his second hat trick of the playoffs).
And I can predict some of you will look at that roster and say that he wasn’t exactly playing with a bunch of slouches – and that is certainly true, since that team had the likes of Messier, Robitaille, Graves, Courtnall, Tikkanen, Leetch, Beukeboom, Samuelsson, etc – but even though there were some big names on that roster, many of them were on the decline, and they were, in my opinion, far from one of the best teams in the league at that point. Without Gretzky on that roster, I’m not even sure you can say that team makes the playoffs that year, much less to the 3rd round. Not sure you can say the same about a bunch of the other centers that we’re looking at.
