By NICK COWLING
The New York Rangers announced their intentions to dramatically augment the roster in the hopes of competing for future Stanley Cups this past Thursday. While that may sound par for the course for a sports team, the announcement came in the form of an open letter to the fan base and a press conference.
” As we approach the trade deadline later this month and into the summer, we will be focused on adding young, competitive players that combine speed, skill and character,” writes General Manager Jeff Gorten and Team President Glen Sather. The level of transparency shown by management is something rather foreign to sports fans as their are literal entire markets created around rumor mills and speculation as to a franchises assumed mindset.
What makes this particular rebuild announcement the more fascinating however is that the Rangers are a New York market team. These teams are notorious for attempting to bandage wounds with exorbitant contracts and free agency spending rather than calculated selling off players for assets like young, contract controlled players or draft picks.
As of their last league evaluation, Forbes ranked the New York Rangers as the most valuable hockey franchise in the NHL at $1.5 Billion. In recent years, the Rangers haven seen appearances in three conference finals and one Stanley Cup final. The past three seasons, however, have seen a notable weaker and more flawed team with struggles coming to a head in this current 2017-18 season.
Part of the pain of these rebuilds is the departure of fan favorites and formerly long tenured players. “This may mean we lose some familiar faces, guys we all care about and respect. While this is part of the game, it’s never easy,” Gorton and Sather write.
Other New York Markets
The paragons of successful North American sports teams, the New York Yankees, have also recently seen great success and soaring future expectations thanks to an unexpected and out of character rebuild.
Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman saw two different styles of team building in a several year span. The team went into the 2014 season having just spent millions of dollars on free agents like outfielder Jacoby Ellsbury and catcher Brian McCann. With limited investment return and the team struggling, Cashman implemented transactions normally seen as alien to the premier sports franchise.
“Cashman was able to captialize on his bad team of big name, still solid players (McCann, Beltran, Chapman, Miller) and a tight AL playoff race to sell off those players to teams needing the extra edge.” says Kevin Natalizio, 23 a Yankees fan, “It was really the perfect storm for a quick rebuild, but still speaks volumes about Cashman that he is more than a guy with a big check book.”
The “rebuild” is an often cherished tool for sports teams. A sort of reset button that allows for a franchise to avoid the dreaded purgatory of being just good enough to miss out on high draft picks but just weak enough to never seriously compete for playoff dominance.
The New York Knicks, basketball’s most valuable franchise, who share MSG as a home with the Rangers, have been an antithesis of a tear down rebuild. The Knicks have spent most of the last two decades burning money on failed free agency signings and accommodations of disastrous trades that have bled draft picks for ineffective, disappointing players.
Despite the unfamiliarity with the process the Rangers are about to undertake, the great and almost immediate success of the Yankees must act as an alluring potential. Even if the investment doesn’t pay off as instant or as effectively, the principles of acknowledging the need to build and the openness with the fan base serve still serve a greater purpose.
Article was really well written actually, just a couple of easy fix errors. In the first quote from Sather and Gorton there is a space between the quotation mark and the actual quote, in the second paragraph the wrong “there” is used and the word checkbook is one world. Otherwise, great article! Very informative, subhead was great and so were the links.