Trading four consecutive first-round draft picks in an attempt to add the missing piece/s for Stanley Cup runs was always a risk/reward proposition. And let’s face it, the deals that sent away the Rangers’ top picks from 2013 through 2016 in exchange for Rick Nash, Marty St. Louis and Keith Yandle did not bring the ultimate reward.
The Blueshirts came close a couple of times, made it to the 2014 Cup final on the wings of the late France St. Louis and then finished with the best record in the league the following season with the organization’s best team since 1993-94.
Maybe they’d have won it in 2015 if Mats Zuccarello hadn’t gone down at the end of Round One and if Ryan McDonagh, Dan Girardi and Marc Staal had been able to skate on more than a sum of three good legs/ankles/knees among them by the time it was over.
Yet they did not win it and so, ultimately, trading away the four first-rounders went for, if not naught, then for diminishing returns. Trading the future for the present is always defensible if a championship is won as a result. You bet it would have been great for Doug Weight, Tony Amonte and Todd Marchant to grow up on Broadway, but no one looks askance at the deals that sent them away in exchange for 1994, even if the organization would later pay a long-term price for the absence of kids coming through the pipeline.
In real time, the deals for Nash, St. Louis and Yandle all made sense, though if management had known at the time that Yandle would be used on the third pair and on the second power-play unit, then the deal was pretty much nonsensical from the start.
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That, however, is old news. What is new — or at least germane at the moment — is that the Rangers, 2-5-2 entering Monday’s match at the Garden against the Sharks, seem to be feeling the effects of the loss of those four first-rounders.
In a league that’s turning young, the Rangers are beginning to tip a little bit older without the benefit of a steady pipeline, and yes, the situation would be much more troubling without the free-agent signings of college free agents Kevin Hayes and Jimmy Vesey.
Let us stipulate that the Blueshirts were not going to be in a position to draft a Connor McDavid, Auston Matthews, Jack Eichel, Patrik Laine, William Nylander or Zach Werenski if they had held onto their picks. They were not going to be able to acquire their missing generational, game-changing talent had they not made those deals.
What would they look like had they not only kept their selections but had hit on them? Well, are we suggesting the Rangers would still have acquired Nash, St. Louis and Yandle without having to yield first-rounders in order to get them? Are we operating under the theory that the Rangers would have selected in the same spots they forfeited?
That seems wildly impractical, but it is even more so to attempt to gauge what the Blueshirts would have looked like in the absence of those deals. OK, so no Nash for 2012-13, but wouldn’t the Rangers have sought to acquire another goal-scorer who might have cost them a first-rounder as part of the package? And isn’t there every chance that the Rangers would have looked to move Brandon Dubinsky, anyway? And then, all right, no deal for St. Louis, but without Nash, would the team have traded Marian Gaborik before firing John Tortorella?
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But since the entire exercise is hypothetical conducted in retrospect, let us presume the Rangers would have drafted between 18 and 28 those four years. This is the pool of players they might have chosen.
From 2013: Kerby Rychel, Anthony Mantha, Andre Burakovsky, Shea Theodore, Marko Dano, Ryan Hartman.
From 2014: Tony DeAngelo, Nick Schmaltz, Robby Fabbri, Kasperi Kapanen, David Pastrnak, Josh Ho-Sang.
From 2015: Colin White, Brock Boeser, Travis Konecny, Anthony Beauvillier.
From 2016: No one from the latter part of the first round has played an NHL game other than Tage Thompson.
So some talent yes, but unless the Rangers had selected Pastrnak, no game-changers. The effect of the missing four first-rounders will have more of an impact going forward than it has to date.