He operates at a rotary dial pace in an iPhone 5 world, but that’s all right. Glen Sather, The Last Lion of Winter, is having the last laugh on everyone who was so darn sure time had passed him by.
Which is pretty much everyone.
The Rangers general manager is going back to the finals for the first time in 24 years since leading the Oilers to their (and his) fifth Stanley Cup in 1990. He’s going back with a team he built, rebuilt, and rebuilt again.
He’s going back while his contemporaries are long gone from the scene and spending their time writing their memoirs or off somewhere at a fishing hole. He is 70 and as much a rapscallion now as when he was smirking behind the Edmonton bench.
A story from Game 5 of the East finals in Montreal: There was Sather minding his own business in the press box suite assigned to Rangers management when a Canadiens representative entered and instructed the GM to remove the omnipresent cigar — unlit, by the way — from his mouth or else the home team would sic the fire marshal on him.
First: Who else in this day and age do you know of who chomps on an unlit cigar? Second: Sather told the fellow to by all means have the Canadiens send the fire marshal up if that’s what they intended to do. Third: The issue was dropped. Fourth: Do not mess around with old school.
There is no denying Sather has received quite a few mulligans along the way from an owner, Jim Dolan, who reveres him. The first few years of his tenure that began in June of 2000 were an exercise in free-spending futility. His early coaching hires were uninspired.
But then he reinvented the Rangers during that Owners’ Lockout II, creating a Little Prague in New York in which Jaromir Jagr and Martin Rucinsky, Martin Straka, Petr Prucha, Michal Rozsival, Marek Malik and Petr Sykora welcomed a rookie goaltender from Sweden named Henrik Lundqvist into a United Nations of a locker room.
We know about the big money mistakes, many of which he was able to use the Garden’s financial muscle to mitigate, or erase. If the financial tools are there, it would have been derelict for Sather not to use them. So a buyout on Bobby Holik and a buyout on Wade Redden and a buyout on Chris Drury.
And one of the best trades in Rangers’ history — maybe the best trade in franchise history unless that’s the deal for Mark Messier or the long ago acquisition of Ed Giacomin from the AHL Providence Reds — in sending Scott Gomez to Montreal in exchange for a package including the rights to Ryan McDonagh.
No cigar for the Canadiens on that one.
Again, Sather operates at his own pace and it often can be infuriatingly slow. The Rangers took too long to address Lundqvist’s contract extension. They waited too long to deal seriously with Derek Stepan’s restricted free agency and they just about sent Dan Girardi to the brink.
But Sather, who is as loyal an individual extant as both a friend and an executive, built this city’s team into a Stanley Cup finalist. He’s the one who wanted Rick Nash and broke up the core, if not the essence of the 2011-12 109-point, Eastern Conference finalists, to get him.
Sather stuck by Chris Kreider when it would have been easy to bail on the Boston College kid who never was in the good books of the former coach. Sather was the one in the front office determined to bring back Mats Zuccarello from Russia last season. The GM was the one who pulled the trigger on the trade that sent captain Ryan Callahan — a very popular figure and a core Black-and-Blueshirt — plus what has become two first-round draft picks to Tampa Bay for Marty St. Louis.
And maybe most importantly, Sather hired the right coach with the right personality at the right time in Alain Vigneault after dismissing John Tortorella at what was also exactly the right time. Tortorella took the team so far. It was Sather who recognized the necessity of hiring a polar opposite in temperament and philosophy in order to get the Rangers where they needed to go.
It was Sather who identified Vigneault, with whom he had no prior relationship, as the benevolent despot required to save the day.
A few weeks before the end of the season, Sather told me he had no plans to step down or step away from the GM’s job; no intention to enjoy life at the fishing hole or on a safari as club president while leaving the day-to-day grind to someone else, perhaps someone from his staff that includes Jeff Gorton and Jim Schoenfeld. It is unknown whether this unexpected run has changed his outlook. There is no better way to go out than on top.
That, though, is for the future that has become now, not only for the Rangers but for their Lion of Winter who is roaring into the finals.