YOU could hear the whispers all around the league. Glen Sather had lost his fastball somewhere on the road from Alberta to Broadway. Right. Turns out that he lost his fastball just the way Roger Clemens had lost his.

Acquiring Pavel Bure for essentially the difference of a dozen or so spots in this year’s Entry Draft and an expendable prospect on defense doesn’t guarantee anything this year for the GM or for his Rangers, who have played so poorly in the last few weeks they’ve lost sole control of their destiny. It sure helps, but it doesn’t guarantee that the Rangers will make the playoffs.

It does, however, guarantee that the Rangers will have a far stronger platform on July 1 from which to make offers to impending free agents Bobby Holik and Billy Guerin, each as essential as Bure and Eric Lindros in the team’s necessary bid to shortcut the unacceptable length of time a 30-team league demands of a rebuilding program.

Acquiring Bure – just another one of those one-dimensional 60-goal scorers who are absolutely ruining this NHL with their creativity, flair and skill, don’t you know? – will open the eyes and ears of Holik and Guerin because great players want nothing more than to be surrounded by other great players. The money will be there this summer. What Guerin and Holik will want, in addition to the money, is the chance to win.

Bure gives the Rangers that chance to win. Bure gives Holik and Guerin every reason to wait until July 1 to see what the Rangers will come up with. Bure makes the Rangers worth watching every night, the way Lindros does when he’s healthy.

Sather threw down yesterday. The GM left small-market Canada behind and stood up for New York, where the people who support his franchise have to pay $7 in tolls if they’re driving in from Queens, $6 if they’re coming across the Hudson, and then maybe $32 more to park before even stepping foot into the Garden to use the tickets for which they pay premium prices.

The Rangers and Cablevision can afford the $20 million over the next two years they now owe Bure, can afford whatever it is that Holik and Guerin are going to want in July. What the Rangers and Cablevision can’t afford is to keep missing the playoffs.

The league can’t afford that, either. The NHL can’t have Broadway dark in May and June every year. It can’t. Sorry if this offends, but the NHL needs a strong New York more than it needs a strong Calgary and Edmonton. That’s reality, if not romance.

Bure, not quite yet 31, comes with a reputation as a selfish player. Some of that reputation is a result of bad-mouthing from coaches by whom he has been betrayed. Duane Sutter, whom Bure recommended for the job when asked his opinion by ownership, turned on him quickly this year. Terry Murray can’t say enough bad things about Bure.

This is the same Murray, who, in Game 1 of the 2000 playoffs against a Devils team terrified of losing in the first round for the third straight year, decided it was time to teach his 58-goal scorer a lesson, and thus gave him 3:27 of ice in the first period of what turned out to be a New Jersey sweep. This is the same Murray who wouldn’t allow Lindros to get on the ice against Sergei Fedorov in Game 1 of the 1997 Finals in what turned out to be a Detroit sweep.

Bure will succeed here, I am sure of that. He will be fine here, just the way Lindros has been fine here, and I am sure of that, too.

And he will have that chance – and we will have that chance to be entertained by him – because the guy from western Canada can still bring it.