It's Time for the Rangers to Hire a New General Manager

For the cynics who came into the season thinking that the Rangers were going to stink and now get to say “I told you so,” mazal tov. For the rest of us, this season was a heartbreaker not only for the record, not only for the fall from the President’s Cup to out of the playoffs, but for how they got there. Too often the team showed apathy, appeared unprepared, and appeared unwilling to consider that their game was the problem.

There were issues on the bench and on the ice, and dysfunction off of it. Peter Laviolette and Phil Housley were the first to go, but the general manager shouldn't be safe either.

Most of you who subscribe to this site and read the comments know where I stand on Chris Drury. For those who don’t, I think that as a team president and GM he’s perfectly cromulent. He’s probably one of the top 10 or 15 GMs in the NHL, but that’s more a reflection of the fact that there are a lot of really terrible general managers in this league than it is a compliment toward Drury. Former MLB broadcaster Jim Kaat once said that, a month into any given season, you could put any pitcher into an MRI tube and find a reason to put them on the injured list. So yeah, Drury has made mistakes, but find me a GM without blood on his hands.

Even the so-called “really good GMs” have their terrible deals:

• Jim Nill traded a first round pick for Nils Lundqvist
• Bill Zito traded a first and Spencer Knight for Seth Jones
• Doug Armstrong let Alex Pietrangelo walk so he could sign Torey Krug
• Julien BrisBois traded a first, second, third, fourth, and fifth for Tanner Jeannot

Need more? Go look back at some of the trades that happened this year alone. Drury has, in this writer’s opinion, done the best he could with the assets he had and the limited freedom he was given. You can take umbrage with the Buchnevich move, with his moves for peripheral players, but as Eric said, it’s unfair to judge him by what he wasn’t asked to do, which until now meant addressing the core.

I wholly agree with what Eric and Joe said on a recent podcast episode that Drury, probably as far back as the debacle against the Devils, knew that this club’s issue wasn’t the only the coaching or the fringe players, but the core itself—a core that Joe rightly called out as carrying themselves with an air of entitlement despite no wins to back up that attitude. The problem is that Drury didn’t (or more likely couldn’t) do anything about it until now. Personally, my biggest gripe with Drury is not so much the talent on the ice, but the coaches on the bench. Gerard Gallant and Laviolette were (to put it mildly) uninspired choices and the fact that the Rangers can't find a defensive assistant is crazy pants.

People will—correctly—say that the way he dispatched Barclay Goodrow was cold, that the memo declaring Jacob Trouba and Chris Kreider as available caused the locker room to fracture. But here’s the thing: He wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t wrong to want to get Goodrow out of here, he wasn’t wrong to want to move Trouba, he wasn’t wrong to recognize that, even when things were going well at the start of the season, this core of players wasn’t doing anything discernibly different from years past where they were good enough to make the playoffs but not good enough to hoist the Cup. If this team was unable to handle the criticism and the noise, then that's just further evidence that Drury was 100% right in his evaluation of them.

Having said all of that, we come back to the disappointment of this season and the fact that while I personally believe most of the issues stem from the players and the coach, the GM does deserve some of the hit as well. If people want a new general manager, I won’t say that they’re wrong. In fact, I'm here to tell you that the Rangers probably should hire a new general manager.