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Tuesday, October 5, 1999
Rangers root of all evil
Senators antithesis of spendthrift Blueshirts
It's Canuck bucks and a shoestring vs. dead presidents and Broadway's open wallet.
The Ottawa Senators vs. the New York Rangers, everything that's right about building an NHL contender up against everything that is wrong.
We know who you, and just about everybody else in Canada, is rooting for.
We certainly have enough threats to NHL hockey in Canada to go around with our slow-acting politicians, the selfish 'We're all right so it can't be a problem' deep thinkers in Toronto and our Canadian peso.
Outside our border, the threat is the New York Rangers, the Death Stars of the NHL.
They signed unrestricted free agents Theo Fleury, Valeri Kamensky, Sylvain Lefebvre and Stephane Quintal in the off-season and just recently took advantage of the Penguins' cash crunch to add defenceman Kevin Hatcher for nothing more than Peter Popovic.
It was the Rangers, you will remember, who also tried to lure restricted free agent Joe Sakic away from Colorado a couple of years ago with a front-end loaded deal. The offer was made at a time when the Avs' owners were going through a cash crunch.
The Avalanche hung onto Sakic, but the deal helped drive up the price for other restricted free agents.
Rangers GM Neil Smith makes no apologies, of course. He knows if he doesn't spend the money, somebody else will be brought in to do it.
This is a city that waits for nothing, a place where time is altered. Why do you think it's called a New York minute? Because it only has 50 seconds.
People can't be bothered waiting for a traffic light, much less an NHL team to rebuild.
Smith is under pressure to build a winner, yesterday, and so he takes what amounts to an unlimited budget and exceeds it.
The Rangers' biggest competition in the NHL comes from teams like the Senators, Dallas and Detroit.
It might be tougher right in his own backyard where it's the New York Yankees, the Mets, the Knicks, the Giants, the Jets, Broadway, the Metropolitan Opera and everything else going on here in the Big Apple.
If you're not a winner here, you're nowhere.
The Gallery Gods in MSG aren't staying quiet, not with the Blueshirts having missed the playoffs the last two years, despite Smith's best attempts to buy the Rangers out of their ineptitude.
Free-agent frenzy
Consider what Smith will pay this season for his free-agent haul during the summer (the figures include signing bonus payments): Fleury, $8.5 million; Kamensky, $6 million; Quintal, $3.95 million and Lefebvre, $2.6 million for a total of about $21 million U.S.
That's what the Senators will pay their entire team this year.
There in lies the delicious rub, the one saving grace in building a winner in hockey.
The best team, not the one with the best players, is going to win.
There's no better example of that than the Senators and that's what makes tonight's matchup significant.
In baseball, there is almost no way a team that ranks in the bottom couple of teams in payroll is going to be able to challenge the likes of the Yankees or the Atlanta Braves.
The Stars won the Stanley Cup last year, but they defeated the Sabres, a team that was ranked about 20th of the 27 teams in payroll last year.
Ottawa finished third in the league overall with the third-lowest payroll.
The Rangers are off to an indifferent start, tying Edmonton and losing to the Canucks, a team nobody is picking to make the playoffs much less be a Cup contender.
There are going to be a lot of people rooting for the Senators tonight, a lot of them in the offices of NHL clubs north of the border.
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