Jim Dolan was on the FAN yesterday defending Glen Sather again, even though there has been no hockey since he last defended the GM who has led his team to four straight non-playoff seasons, two of them as head coach, even though the team is finally saying it will do what fans have been longing to see them do, rebuild the team from the ground up.
Dolan again showed, as quoted in the Times today, that he is at once a master of the obvious and undeterred by facts. “We'd go draft to draft,” he said, referring to the state of affairs when Sather first came in 2000, “get a No. 1 pick, and 9 times out of 10 dealt him away.”
How convenient to forget that Sather was the one who traded away top ten picks Manny Malhotra and Pavel Brendl in trades for veterans Eric Lindros and Martin Rucinsky, now departed after failing to help make the Rangers competitive; traded his top pick in the 2000 draft, second rounder Filip Novak, and his 2002 top ten first round pick for injury-plagued Pavel Bure; and has used two of his three high first round picks on goalies, which means he will probably have to eventually trade one away.
“The problem is, number one, it didn't work,” Dolan said of recent playoff failures. “We had some of the best talent in the NHL and we didn't make the playoffs.” Gee, we wish we had those kind of powerful analytical insights!
Back in the real world, the Ranger web site prospect update, having run out of things to say about how prospects are doing, looks ahead instead, with a preview of the weekend.
Meanwhile, in Hartford, two of Sather’s mildly heralded acquisitions, Dwight Helminen and Lee Falardeau, have been sent one level down to Charlotte of the ECHL. The Pack was nevertheless able to win its Friday night game behind a couple of prospects Ranger fans are actually looking forward to seeing in New York, Jozef Balej and Dom Moore.
On the lockout front, as predicted, player retractions of pro-cap sentiments made their appearance. Todd Marchant, a one-time Ranger draftee who has been a longtime NHL veteran with other teams, blasted Mike “Young Bozo” Commodore, and Mike Ribeiro recanted his statement of earlier this week with the tried and true “out of context” defense.
Finally, disappointment north of the border that Osama bin Laden had no words of wisdom for Gary Bettman and Bob Goodenow in his latest videotape.
[Photo courtesy of NHL Enterprises]
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