Okay. I was talking about McD, which you've skirted twice now. I'll save you the "a broken clock is right twice a day" and we can throw out Sather's greatest success in recent history based on an arbitrary decision that it doesn't matter because...something.
It is a lazy exercise because it makes your points weak. One cannot just arbitrarily lop of data points when evaluating what an organization is like. If you have an investment and it does nothing but loose money for you and then suddenly has a few good years of returns but is still an overall negative...guess what? You still have a loosing trade.
You traded the core of a winning close nit team for that of underachievers.
As for what I based it on, that is several things. But let's just go with one. I have said several times that I am fortunate enough to be privy to certain events. One of which was a Rangers luncheon with, among others, Dave Maloney. He likened the trades to that which tore apart the team that went to the finals against Montreal. All in an effort to "get over the top".
Great, but overall he has been awful. Which means that the team could not have possibly been very good, from year to year.
Those are fine moves. They however do not make up for other bad ones. Nor do they make up for the fact that the organization has not been an overall success.
No to me, they do not cancel out what his overall record is. In ALL of his tenure, how many top-6 forwards got developed? And I do not view as MSL being acquired for nothing. I view it as Jackass bidding against himself and squandering assets. The MCD trade and picking up Stralman off of the scrapheap by themselves do not qualify as making the organization an overall success.
And then what happened? After that team was allowed to grow together? Typical Sather.
Who dismantled it?
See, to me, talking about GM moves in the scope of the team that currently exists isn't "arbitrarily lopping off data points," it's talking about the here and now rather than doting on the past. The investment metaphor isn't really an apt one because Sather isn't our choice, we don't pay him, and his value effects us in no way at all. If we were grading him as his own owner that'd apply, but we're not in that position, we're grading him as fans of the current Rangers team.
When I look at the team that is the Rangers right now, I see a lot of smart moves paying off in McD, Stralman, Zucc, and Brass as a return from the Gaborik trade. I see Gaborik, who is a shell of himself when he was here, falling off the map in another city while the scoring RW the Rangers acquired to replace him is still chugging along. I don't see much fallout from past mistakes, Drury, Gomez, Redden, and the like. It's hard not to imagine what things could have been like with a better 2003 draft, I'll give you that, but aside from a poor draft, which nearly every franchise has had, what bad decisions are lingering today? You'd say the Nash trade and it's effects. I'd disagree. Either way, I'd argue that there is not nearly enough fallout from bad decisions to cover up the good that some savvy moves are currently doing for this team. McD alone is a huge, huge deal.
