THIS isn’t so much about Glen Sather’s failure as head coach as it is about the unique corporate culture in which he works at the Garden, the one in which no demands are made of the hired help, no accountability is required of the names on the marquee, and results are secondary to making nice with the sponsors and looking good on TV. Hockey is only part of it for the Rangers, with winning as optional as most of their practices.
At the Garden, if you’re a Ranger, it’s money for nothing and chicks for free.
Sather’s decision to step down as head coach and install Tom Renney as temporary keeper of the gates was absolutely necessary. Not because of the upcoming NHL trade deadline, or because the Rangers had descended into the league’s statistical netherworld, but because the environment in the locker room had become so contaminated by a combination of self-loathing and disrespect for the head coach that the very essence of the franchise’s integrity was being threatened with extinction.
“We have to work on getting respect back,” Renney, an authoritarian hockey lifer, said after conducting a practice in which Rangers players took more hits to make plays during the session’s first 15 minutes than they had in their past two league games. “I’m talking about from our fans and our peers around the league.”
Sather’s astounding and well-chronicled laissez-faire approach to running his team reflects, albeit perhaps to an extreme, a philosophy created by ownership in which its players are coddled, treated like rock stars. The most highly trained and motivated hockey players in the world come to Broadway and cease to exist as athletes. Instead, they become faux celebrities. Hard hats and lunch pails are traded in for tuxedos and glamour shoots.
When Sather reached his decision Tuesday to relinquish his coaching duties following a late-afternoon meeting with Jim Dolan, the Rangers were gathering for a charity event at the Garden. Two days earlier they had an open practice and a luncheon for sponsors. They had a similar open practice the previous week. In between appearances, they squeezed in a couple of games. The season’s worth of itineraries mandates nearly as many public appearances as they do mandatory practices. Hockey is only a fraction of it.
Winning is only a fraction of that. There’s no doubt Dolan wants to win. He’ll spend whatever it takes. He hasn’t raised ticket prices in years. He’s pledged a 10-percent cut in price for next season. But if the CEO’s heart is in the right place, his head seems to be AWOL when it comes to overseeing the operation of his hockey team. The tone was set for this year – it really was – when Dolan announced before the season that wins and losses would not necessarily be the measure of Sather, that while making the playoffs was of course an objective, it was not required.
It is too late for this coaching change to make an impact in the standings. It is not too late for ownership to recognize how, even with the best of intentions, all of the money and all of the adulation and all of the coddling have corrupted the organization’s soul. It is not too late for ownership to demand accountability from its employees. Not too late for Sather, from his seat as president, and GM to do the same. That, even more than making productive trades, is his most important responsibility.
