Besides McDonagh and Moore,all of the Rangers D should be made available for the right price. I like Moore. The Rangers can sign him to a cheap 2 year contract. The Rangers can work with them and develop him. Not give them away. D is the Rangers strength but where has it gotten them? These D in particular. Change up the mix. D are hard to find but you don't want to trade them away for nothing and then realize "Oh **** we made a mistake". Girardi and Stralman are group IIIs this summer. DZ is a group II. Staal will be a group III next summer.
Everyone is up in arms about the Rangers loss last night. Is it really a surprise? There are a handful of forwards worth keeping for next season. The D is the same. The media keeps writing about the contract negotiations with Lundqvist and Callahan. Brooks keeps writing about it. The Rangers shouldn't give them 8 year MAX contracts and crazy dollars because the cap will be $100M at the end of this CBA.
Management has some huge decisions to make. They have delayed making them.
The Rangers aren't one trade away from becoming a Cup contender. It doesn't work that way in the real world. It only works that way on NHL 14.
The bottom six needs to be rebuilt. This isn't a four month project.
No stupid trades for guys with term on their contracts. The Rangers rarely do that.
But the roster needs to be re-modeled a bit RB. We won't get on track by making decisions on who to keep and fill the other spots from within.
This is -- still -- Torts roster. No doubt. We don't have many players that are sharp with the puck. The D's we have aren't fundamentally flawed, but they are not used to pass the puck in the environemt and under the conditions of the best teams right now in this league. You see McD and Girardi pass the puck one way the first 30 minutes of a game, then go back to that
"manure spreader"-type of passing game. Pucks are sent flying all over the place. Callahan plays with his head under his arm. Richards is skating in no-mans land. Scratch that, standing still in no-mans land. Staal is not particulary poised with the puck, looking lost on the ice. No wonder, he hasn't played hockey in a couple of years and before that fought hard just to get along at a high level. Strålman? Well, he is making decent plays. But still pretty "flat" in lack of a better word offensively. And he is not McD II defensively.
Just as Vancouver's D's are driving Torts nuts from time to time, our D's must be giving AV grey hair...
Its a horrible market out there to make moves, but I don't think you can evaluate what we have in sum -- while what we have is fundamentally flawed. Like you can't really answer if the sum of our individual pieces based on what is shown on the ice while those pieces don't fit together anyway. It would look flawed no matter what.
We must get a D that can hit the ice and take controll of the puck and be a top factor in that regard. Moving the puck. Like, no other team has done well without that ever as far as I know, why could we? Heck even Calgary in 03' had Toni Lydman, and they probably come close to having the worst puckmoving blueline for a SCF's ever. Toni Lydman would by far be the best PMD on this team. People are putting their heads in the sand not acknowledging that as far as this team is concerned. I don't get why people can ignore this flaw that this have to the extent you guys are doing it. I mean, if you have no forward that can score 25 goals nobody would expect a cup. If you don't have a goalie that can save 90% of the shots, you don't expect to win a cup (unless you work in Philly). But we can do with a blueline obviously on which Toni Lydman by a wide margin would be a stand out lol. So typical NYR.
Fix some of those flaws, then we can start to evaluate if the sum of what we have is enough or not. I don't think its as far away as some thing.
