Thinking about current Ranger General Manager Jeff Gorton and how good he has been for the Rangers.
What you’re about to see is a text conversation expanded a bit.
To give more of a backstory, Nick and Shawn had this conversation about two weeks ago, Nick for and Shawn against Jeff Gorton. What you’ll see here is a more thought out piece where both lay out their opinions.
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I know when you look at the standings right now and you look at the current state of the Blueshirts you’ll call me nuts for saying Gorton has been doing a good job. However, I’ll argue that where we are right now as a franchise is because of the years of mismanagement by Glen Sather.
Don’t believe me? Look at how Sather tied up this team’s cap for so many years in bad contracts and traded away years of first round picks to not deliver a Cup to Broadway. Years of misses on first round picks, when the Rangers actually had them, on the likes of Lundmark, Brendl, Jessiman, McIlrath. How about locking up a clearly declining Dan Girardi to a massive contract and then doubling down and locking up Marc Staal who hasn’t been the same since he took that puck to the eye in 2012-2013. Letting Anton Stralman walk in favor of signing an over the hill Dan Boyle. Signing Tanner Glass to a three-year contract while choosing to trade Derek Dorsett away or letting Carcillo walk when they were both better options than Glass.
Maybe Gorton’s best moment to date as GM has been maximizing on Brassard’s value and stealing a highly skilled and talented 1C in Mika Zibanejad from Ottawa, while also acquiring a 2nd round pick (used in the Brendan Smith deal).
I know people have been down on Gorton for his trade at the draft where he moved Stepan and Raanta to Arizona for Tony DeAngelo, and the 7th overall pick that turned into Lias Andersson. I look at that trade this way, Gorton clearly realized the Rangers had signed Stepan to unfavorable deal, especially with a NTC that was due to kick in July 1st, and wanted to get out from under his cap hit for more cap flexibility. When you look at where the NYR are now at this point, moving on from Stepan was the right move. If they allowed Stepan’s NTC to kick in they wouldn’t be able to move him without his approval, which I’m sure he wouldn’t give. Further, Gorton was able to acquire a top-10 draft pick while also obtaining a young puck moving d-man who could be in the Rangers top-4 for the next 10 years. Not a bad deal for a team that’s on the rebuild, right?
I know Shawn will point out the Eric Staal trade as being one of Gorton’s more down moments. However, I’ll point out that this trade looks like a trade that Glen Sather pulled the trigger on. Giving up two 2nd round picks and a promising young talent like Aleksi Saarela for a vet who WAS a star player has Glen Sather’s fingerprints all over it.
My only point of contention with Gorton so far has been keeping AV around to misuse a lot of the talent brought in by Gorton. AV deserves to be fired but if Gorton is letting him hang around to lead the tank to fire him in April, so be it.
I’ll say this, a lot of the things Jeff Gorton has done as GM are things many fans, who’re now calling for his head, were clamoring to see him do. Buyout Girardi, gain cap flexibility, bring in Kevin Shattenkirk, acquire picks and young assets (more to come with the impending purge of pending UFA’s). People wanted the Rangers to sell at the trade deadline this year instead of trying to load up again and that’s exactly what they’re going to do. So, if you’re one of the fans who wanted one of these things above and you’re now calling out Jeff Gorton, aren’t you just calling out yourself? Continue to let the man try and reshape this team in his image as he’s trying to work out from underneath the mess Glen Sather left in his wake. Three seasons as GM isn’t enough to undo a decade of mismanagement.
Written By: Nick Peritz
[/text_output]While the jury is still out on what we will see from both DeAngelo and Andersson, a logical explanation is that this team needed to move on from Stepan before his full no-trade clause came into effect.
Trading him is what needed to be done so we wouldn’t be stuck with cap hit.
Fine, fair.
That isn’t the only traded that has been contested under the Gorton era. The trade with Carolina that gave us Eric Staal has been seen as one of the biggest goofs in recent Ranger memory. More because of how management allowed Alain Vigneault to handle him. Yes, you can say that the Rangers did not need to trade for Eric Staal and you’d be 100% right on that point.
The issue is how they used Eric Staal during his duration here in New York. He wasn’t in his natural center position and he was put on the wing with a player that didn’t complement him well, a second-year forward in Kevin Hayes who was trying to find his way around in his first year and lacked the confidence that we see from him now.
That lack of trust and using the player based on instinct of past performance hurt the Rangers chances of trying to re-sign him if he wanted to come back (I didn’t want him back), and most importantly showed how Vigneault handled deployment of certain players.
Let’s move on from that and look at something else. Vigneault is our head coach still. He’s been given tools to ruin this team’s chemistry, ruin everything that this team has done in the past. Sure, Vigneault has given us playoff berths, and a Stanley Cup final appearance with a team he had no input over, but let’s look past that, right?
To me the biggest thing that stands out by Gorton’s stint as Rangers general manager is what he has done, and what he has allowed this coaching staff to do, without putting his foot down and giving his staff a true direction of how this team should be laid out and given the best roster there is to win.
In the end it is the coach’s final say on how he wants the team to be constructed on the ice. What should happen is a little more voice from management, especially from Gorton. He’s given Vigneault great players. Most recently, he gave him coveted free-agent defenseman Kevin Shattenkirk. A great partner for Ryan McDonagh, only to be wasted on the third pairing and not used to his full potential.
Isn’t it the general manager’s job to step in and intervene on issues like that? You’re paying Shattenkirk a pretty penny to be a third-pairing defenseman and a power play specialist.
There’s more examples of wanting to see Gorton step in to push the directive of the team on certain players. Pavel Buchnevich and Henrik Lundqvist are prime examples of guys who should be getting the help from management. A 35-year old goaltender is on pace for 68 games, where he’s seeing many nights with 40+ shots against him. A young Russian winger who gets yo-yoed between the first and fourth lines and gets sheltered minutes, because the coach doesn’t trust him in their own end.
Let the kid make mistakes and learn how to improve on those mistakes, it’ll help him become a better player.
That’s just bad management for allowing a coach to throw all the hard work done to improve the team away, because it doesn’t fit his narrative or doesn’t fit his game plan. In the end, you’re only successful as your upper management. Think of it as your day to day job, your boss is only good as his boss, so if his boss is telling him to do something that in the end is terrible, then your boss is going to be terrible too.
With the Rangers though, it seems that while Gorton might be a good boss, Vigneault is being insubordinate towards him and doing as he pleases. We as fans see it by his lineup decisions. Someone clearly needs to step in here and shake things up.
We as fans aren’t the “dumb, uneducated” fan of years past. Social media has changed that, the internet has changed that. The access we get from the league and their teams in a way has changed that too. YouTube changed that. I can easily watch a video on someone and can tell you ways that Vigneault has ruined him. That idea, mentality from management around the league has to stop.
Fans are more educated (or, at the very least, have easier access to become more educated) and can see through the garbage management and coaching staffs give us. It’s no surprise that the smart fan wants Vigneault gone, because he’s done nothing with a lineup on paper that could do so much more.
It’s also no surprise that some of these same smart fans are wanting Gorton gone. He’s enabled Vigneault’s awful behavior, and as of now, hasn’t done anything to show us he’s willing to change his coach for someone who’d fit under his philosophy.
If the Rangers were serious about a rebuild, then maybe keeping Vigneault makes sense for now, he can push them even further down and most importantly can make the same bone-headed decisions that he’s made his entire coaching tenure.
It’ll be an important offseason for the Rangers. In terms of what they need to look at in the Free Agent market and most importantly, what they decide with the coaching staff. The right thing to do is to get rid of the coaching staff and move on.
You can argue that this wasn’t Gorton’s coach, this was Glen Sather’s. Fine, whatever you want to say about that.
I’m going to bring up the boss analogy again. Your bosses boss gets fired and replaced by someone else, thinking it was your bosses boss that stunk up the place, when in actuality it was your boss.
Now the newer guy comes in, realizes this and now has to sit on his hands and deal with the fact that the person before him, had a concussion that day and hired someone incompetent? I don’t think the real world works that way.
In the end, the Rangers management team needs to sit around together and have a tough talk. A talk that will make them realize things that they probably didn’t consider.
Until then, Jeff Gorton has not done the job as general manager that I expected.
Written By: Shawn Taggart
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Author: BSB Staff
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