BEHIND the barricades, Jim Dolan is chopping off tongues, not salary. Alas, Madison Square Garden has millions more to spend on players and nobody worthy and eligible to take the money.
This takes an explanation the new boss doesn’t want his general managers to give. The Knicks, way over the cap, have such limited options to improve a first-round loser they must give Allan Houston not only the maximum, but perhaps some kind of limited no-trade.
The basketball team wants to keep throwing good money after bad for a championship it can’t admit it is far from winning. After years of being able to spend its way out of disaster, the playing field has been leveled and Dolan’s response is not to level with customers paying a fortune for previous bad decisions.
The Rangers play in a league where you can spend what you want and they can’t improve themselves quickly, either. The anger over their failure to get Jaromir Jagr is refreshing in that we didn’t know people still cared that much – even if many are as clueless as Dolan prefers.
Jagr went to the Capitals because Kris Beech was more attractive than anything Glen Sather had to offer. Beech, 6-2, is bigger than Jamie Lundmark and more certain to play in the NHL than the boom-or bust Pavel Brendl. Short of bringing Jagr to a shell of a team minus Radek Dvorak and Tomas Kloucek, the only real keepers on what you hope someday will be a contender, there was no package that was going to beat Washington’s offer.
No matter what you’ve read, Glen Sather did not refuse to talk about Mike York to jack up an offer of Kim Johnsson and Jan Hlavac. Craig Patrick wasn’t excited about a 5-10, 180-pound center who has worn down at the end of his two NHL seasons, and, in fact, didn’t want to add any NHL salary. The Penguins so loved the Caps’ offer of Beech – who they see eventually teaming with Milan Kraft, a 6-3 former top pick for a towering center ice – plus two more prospects and a Jan Hrdina-for-Danius-Zubrus trade to be announced later, they saw no reason to give the nibbling Sather any last chance to re-bid.
This is not what the screeching hypocrites, insistent for two years that Lundmark and Brendl should be untouchable, want to hear. They would rather overrate the value of bringing Jagr to a team that won’t able to compete for anything better than eighth place in the two years remaining on his contract.
He is a great talent, an NHL scoring champion in a bad year who likely will respond to a fresh start. But he also has been injured a lot and, without Lemieux, never was able to get the Penguins past the second round – a reflection of how high superstars can lift mediocrity around them.
Of course, after four years without playoffs, Ranger fans would settle for even one round and Jagr, indeed, might have gotten the team there. And if the cost for that had been either Lundmark or Brendl, today we would be jumping on the bandwagon squishing Sather.
But we’re not even sure both prospects, let alone one, would have gotten the deal done. We also would suggest anyone who really believes Sather was asleep at the switch wake up and smell the garbage dump the Rangers have become. Bringing in another big name would be giving the patrons another circus to disguise the meager rations of bread.
It’s not going to be any different for Eric Lindros, who likely will wind up in Dallas for Brendan Morrow and Darryl Sydor. Sather can’t compete with that, even if he wanted to for a player with six concussions and meddlesome parents.
Jagr and Lindros can become unrestricted in 2003. Meanwhile, other options will come up. Eventually, somebody will take the Rangers’ money, but it won’t be the right guy until they can also offer him not just a few dollars more, but a chance to play on a contender.
As Sather fishes with limited bait, we shake our heads over what we hear through the car radio: Neil Smith, who passed on Pavel Bure (because he wouldn’t trade Manny Malhotra), Brendan Shanahan and Teemu Selanne, would have gotten this deal done? The Rangers have been cooked for four years and will be at least for two more because of what Smith didn’t get done, which is draft and trade for size and strength.
Certainly at some point his successor will have to land somebody. In the meantime, the people who wait for the Rangers and Knicks to improve themselves should get real about their options.