THE color of money is blue, red and white.

Now all the Ranger$ have to do to justify an orgy of spending unprecedented in hockey history is win games during the regular season, a lot of them, and then win rounds in the playoffs, at least two of them.

Nothing less will be good enough, even if the team isn’t. Team? Who knows? At this point, and until proven otherwise, The $60 Million Rangers are little more than a flock of mercenaries with nothing more in common than huge contracts and a desire to get rich quick on Broadway. Whether the new guys have come to New York to win (as John MacLean did last year), or have come to New York to retire (as did Scott Fraser), is something we cannot know now.

Understand, what the Rangers have done in committing some $67M in guaranteed contracts to six free agents since the market opened on July 1 is not bad for hockey. Expanding the NHL to 30 teams when there may be enough talent for 20 is bad for hockey. Coaching that focuses on defense to the exclusion of offense, is bad for hockey. Having owners in the NHL such as Milstein and Gluckstern, is bad for hockey.

No, what the Rangers have done here since July 1 is not bad for hockey. There is, however, no guarantee that what the Rangers have done here is not going to be bad for the Rangers, themselves.

With support if not a mandate from ownership to spend as much as necessary, Neil Smith went out and got every unrestricted free agent his hockey department wanted. But keep in mind that in spending that sum to sign a goalie, two defensemen, a center, a right wing and a left wing, the Rangers hardly annexed a lineup of all-stars. There aren’t any Gretzkys in there. In fact, among veterans Kirk McLean, Stephane Quintal, Sylvain Lefebvre (whose signing was officially announced yesterday), Tim Taylor, Theo Fleury and Valeri Kamensky, not a one of them have ever been selected to a first all-star team. Only Fleury has even a single second-team designation, that earned during the truncated 1994-95 lockout season.

They aren’t all-stars and never have been, but they’re going to be expected to play up to their all-star level contracts this year, and not only by the fans, and not only by the media, but by the GM and owners who bought – sorry; brought – them here. The burden is going to be enormous on The $60 Million Ranger$, right from opening night in small-market Edmonton.

“It’s not the team making the money; it’s the individuals who are making the money and it’s the individuals who are going to have to justify their contracts,” Smith said yesterday. “Each individual is going to have to live up to his own salary. If they don’t, they’ll be dealt with.”

The problem is, if they don’t live up to their salaries, the Rangers will have no way of dealing with them. In order to get these individuals to come to New York – land of opportunity, yeaaaah – Smith quite naturally had to give out long-term deals. Imagine Kamensky two or three years from now. Imagine Quintal and Lefebre two or three years from now. You’d better imagine, and Cablevision had better imagine, because for better of worse, these new players have signed divorce-proof contracts. No one is taking any of them off the Rangers’ hands.

We’d feel so much better about this if we felt better about Fleury, there’s no denying it. And we’d feel so much better about Fleury if only he hadn’t been so adamant expressing his distaste for playing in New York to Wayne Gretzky in private conversations last winter when The Great One all but begged him to consider coming to Broadway. We’d feel so much better about this if we hadn’t seen Fleury melt into a puddle against Dallas in the Westerns. We’d feel so much better about this if Fleury had had some place else to go for a comparable fee, yet had chosen the Rangers anyway.

And we’d feel so much better about this if the team – and specficially, an all over-30 top four defense of Brian Leetch, Mathieu Schneider, Quintal and Lefebvre – just wasn’t so old, and we hadn’t seen the last two years of geezers gasping to get through the winter intact. We’d feel so much better about this if huge contracts could magically take years off the birth certificates of Lefebvre and Quintal and Kamensky. In expecting these men to play up to their respective millions, the Rangers are going to be asking a great deal of these men. It’s possible they may be asking too much.

Look, we applaud Cablevision, the Garden and the Rangers for their willingness to spend liberally in order to put an entertaining and winning product on the ice for fans who have to dig far too deep into their pockets to attend games. We’d much rather have that than Chicago or Boston, where owners annually make millions, yet won’t spend to construct a championship team.

We don’t question Ranger management’s good intentions here. We just question whether it will work, and whether this astounding outlay of cash is going to be able to buy happiness on Broadway, where the color of money is blue, red and white.