IN the brave new NHL world that will be unveiled on Ratification Thursday, Glen Sather is the wrong person at the wrong time to be leading the Rangers and Tom Renney is the wrong person at the wrong time to be behind the bench.
In an era where league GM’s will have to recruit free agents by selling the credibility and track record of their programs the way big-time college football and basketball coaches solicit high school kids, Sather has very little of either to offer no matter how much cap space he might have available in any given summer.
At a time when the league is going to adopt who knows exactly how many crazy-quilt rules to open up the game and finally is committed to legislating in favor of creativity, the Rangers have a coach in Renney who not only has no big-league success whatsoever but is well known as a technocrat with a career-long dedication to playing the trap.
Essentially every player who’s come to New York the last five years has come for the exorbitant money and only the exorbitant money, forget the malarkey about the great privilege of playing for an Original Six team, forget the Tiffany Apples. Who was it, Valeri Kamensky, who actually came up with the one about signing with the Blueshirts because Wayne Gretzky had once played on Broadway? Too bad that was his most creative moment with the club.
The cost of real estate is higher is higher in New York. The cost of living is higher in New York. The taxes are higher in New York. It’s more difficult to live in New York. Dollar for dollar, even when the Rangers paid more, the players took home less, which is one reason it usually took a lot more to get them here. Did you know that the Panthers agreed to pay the difference in Pavel Bure’s taxes as part of the trade that sent him from Florida to New York?
Now, without the ability to offer bribes, the Rangers will have to rely on reputation in order to attract the league’s best and brightest to Manhattan, and that’s the problem. They’ll have to be able to sell their program now that they won’t be able to buy loyalty, and that’s the problem, too.
When, next summer, the great Jarome Iginla becomes an unrestricted free agent, he’s going to want to know that he’s leaving Calgary for an organization that has a creatively conceived plan that will ensure success on the ice, and, at the moment, that’s a problem, too.
The Rangers probably could have had Wayne Gretzky here as the face of the franchise and their chief recruiter had Sather ever gotten word to The Great One that he’d have been willing to recuse himself to the executive suite, but that never happened, there was never even a hint that 99 would have been welcomed back. Now, it’s too late for that.
But it’s not too late for Sather to check both his ego and old feud at the door and investigate whether Scotty Bowman – who, not incidentally, has spent much of the last year working with the league on the new rules and will understand instantly how to exploit them – would have any interest in returning to the league as a coach.
Success follows success. If Bowman were coach of the Rangers, successful players would follow. We don’t know about it yet, of course, but would there be a better way for Sidney Crosby to learn the game than by beginning his career under Bowman?
Yes, of course it would be a short run, but, a) it would lay a foundation; b) by nature, cap leagues are designed to breed short-run cycles; and c) it would invest some credibility into Sather’s recruiting pitch.
And here’s the beauty part. They can offer Bowman as much money as they please. The Rangers are going to save more than $40M on payroll, surely can they offer to make Bowman the first $5M coach in NHL history when no one else has even made $2M behind the bench.
Bribes for coaches, you see, are still legal.
