Five things: Rangers spending spree could pay off for once
Maybe this time Glen Sather got it right.
Surely the odds have to favor the Rangers GM for a change, if for no other reason than Sather has lost most of his gambles since arriving in New York nearly a decade ago to resurrect a crumbling iconic franchise.
Sather has spent big for players like Eric Lindros, Pavel Bure, Bobby Holik and more recently Wade Redden and Markus Naslund since joining the team in 2000, but New York has been to the playoffs only four times and has won only two first rounds under Sather's watch.
And yet that didn't stop Sather from taking one of his biggest chances this summer by signing flashy forward Marian Gaborik as a free agent. The former Minnesota Wild winger is entering his prime at 27 as one of the most electrifying players in the league, and gives the Rangers the kind of game breaker they've lacked since Jaromir Jagr's first full season with the team. The downside is that Gaborik is injury prone (he had a groin strain after the first day of training camp with New York) and played only 17 games last season because of hip surgery.
• Team preview | Depth ChartStill, Gaborik scored 10 of his 13 goals in the final 11 games when he returned, so the Rangers are betting he has fully recovered and will stay healthy enough to trigger the kind of offense New York needs to be effective in John Tortorella's first full season as coach. The Rangers were competitive last season because they played strong defense and got great goaltending from Henrik Lundqvist, but Tortorella's goal since taking over in late February has been to make New York more of an attacking team.
Last season, he didn't really have the personnel to do it and the situation became untenable after New York blew a 3-1 series lead and lost the first round of the playoffs to Washington. So Sather found a way to pawn off playmaker Scott Gomez's contract on Montreal in June, picking up forward Chris Higgins, and clearing the cap space to sign Vinny Prospal and Ales Kotalik.
The latest reconstruction gives the Rangers a new-look offense that could make a team pretty dangerous with the kind of goaltending Lundqvist provides. Time will tell.
In the meantime, here are five things to know about the Rangers:
1. This season could feature a kinder, gentler Tortorella than the one who earned a one-game suspension during the playoffs for throwing a bottle and brandishing a stick at a fan. Tortorella's, er, emotions have gotten the best of him before, including a 1995 incident when he was an assistant coach at Buffalo and earned a three-game suspension for an altercation with a fan who turned out to be an assistant district attorney. Then there was the time in 1997, when Tortorella was head coach for Rochester of the American Hockey League in 1997, that he shoved a fan in the forehead, although that incident did not result in a suspension. Tortorella has also had his fair share of spirited disagreements with media members, so the Rangers had him go through some media training over the summer to reduce the chances of that happening, too. "The biggest area I have to work on this season is the stupidity that happened in the playoff series last year," Tortorella said. "I've got to get to a point where I don't lose control. Emotion is a strength, but it can be a weakness."
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CBSSports.com's Wes Goldstein, Greg Cimilluca and Erin Brown preview the Atlantic Division. 2. New York's blue line is set as far as the top two units go, but there are three spots up for grabs. The Rangers expect at least two rookies to fill them because the organization has developed some depth on defense in recent years. Draft choices Michael Del Zotto, Corey Potter, Bobby Sanguinetti and Michael Sauer are all in the mix, along with last season's Hobey Baker winner Matt Gilroy, signed as a free agent, and Ryan McDonagh, who came in the Gomez trade.
3. The Rangers began training camp without knowing who will hold down the first line center spot Gomez had. Brandon Dubinsky would have had first dibs on the job, even if his sophomore season didn't live up to his rookie campaign of two years ago, but he's holding out in what is looking increasingly like a no-win situation for him. New York has offered $700,000, half of what Dubinsky sought. Both sides were dug in when camp got under way, but Dubinsky doesn't have any leverage yet under the CBA and the Rangers aren't likely to wait long to fill the hole with someone else.
4. The Rangers surprised a lot of their fans by signing heavyweight Donald Brashear away from Washington with a two-year, $2.8 million deal. Brashear is best known in New York for his vicious and often injury-causing attacks on Rangers players in the last few seasons, with one of the ugliest being a blind side clothesline hit on Blair Betts in last spring's playoffs. Betts couldn't return to the Rangers as a result and is now on a tryout with Philadelphia. Brashear, meanwhile, seems to have been welcomed within the team's locker room, but he was booed handily at a meet-and-greet even earlier this month and during New York's first home preseason game.
5. Can a team missing four of its top five scorers from the previous season really be better offensively? You be the judge. Nik Zherdev is now in Russia, Gomez is in Montreal, Naslund has retired and Dubinsky, of course, is holding out. Zherdev led the pack with 58 points, which ranked him 73rd overall in the league. No place to go here but up.
