The New York Rangers must clean house. This goes beyond firing Chris Drury or trading Vincent Trocheck. This whole organization, from scouting to player development, needs to be completely overhauled. It’s a strange place to be considering that the Rangers were two wins away from a trip to the Stanley Cup Final just two years ago. But the tides change quickly in professional sports, and this is the new reality for the Blueshirts. The Rangers must clean house, and the only person that can do that is James Dolan.
When Chris Drury was promoted to GM, it marked a huge change for the Rangers. Gone were Jeff Gorton, John Davidson, and David Quinn, and in came Drury and his posse. Drury came with a decent reputation, apparently even garnering heavy interest for other jobs in the industry. There’s a world in which the Rangers didn’t fire Gorton and Drury is currently the GM for the Sabres, for example.
Alas, owner James Dolan decided the Rangers needed change. Enter Drury, the snake oil salesman he is, as he convinced Dolan to not only make him General Manager, but also President of Hockey Operations for the Rangers.
While Drury’s overall results have been fine if not solid, the cracks have shown plenty throughout his tenure. Prospect development has been atrocious. Pro scouting has been terrible. Coaching has been weak at best. There’s the old saying “everything he touches turns to gold.” Well, everything Chris Drury touches turns into a hot mess. The Rangers must clean house of everything he’s touched.
What I mean to get at is not that Chris Drury deserves all the blame. Instead, it’s that Chris Drury put the pieces in place for the blame to go around. Drury has made his fair share of horrible transactions and his even fair share of poor draft picks. Take a step back and think about the prospects we are excited about. Are any of them truly top line players? Or are we just hoping they are?
A good General Manager would find a way to make up for that by trusting the smart people around him. Instead, Drury has entrusted people with poor reputations or no reputations at all. Eventually Drury will get fired, and at that point the Rangers must clean house and essentially start from scratch.
Gone must go the off-ice development team of Jed Ortmeyer and Tanner Glass. Ortmeyer and Glass had little to no experience working in their capacity, but are somehow taking key roles in developing players, arguably one of the most important roles in the organization. Unsurprisingly, the Rangers have been among the worst, if not the worst, in the NHL at developing players. This goes far beyond on-ice skills, something that, for some reason Mark Ciaccio is still driving with the prospects and the Hartford Wolf Pack. At least he’s not touching the NHL talent anymore.
Gone must go the brilliant PR staff that refuses to allow young players to answer questions, covers up scandals, and leads some of the worst social media in the entire league (though this is mostly a Dolan thing). Gone must go every single person involved in the atrocity that is the Hartford Wolf Pack, a truly terribly run organization that really helps represent the Rangers in the worst way possible.
The Rangers must clean house of everyone. If Mike Sullivan continues to play veterans over kids in a development year, then he and his team must go too.
The Rangers must clean house, and it starts with Drury and everyone he’s brought into the organization in the past five years.