New York state of mind

Glen Sather, of all people, is caught in the fast lane

The latest NHL news is that the league has rejected provisions in the New York Rangers' contracts with Bobby Holik and Darius Kasparaitis. New York ponied up more than $70 million to sign that pair of snarling body-slammers last month. The league doesn't like it that the deals -- five years, $45 million for Holik; six years, $25.5 million for Kasparaitis -- call for the players to be paid through 2004, even if there's a work stoppage when the collective bargaining agreement runs out in September of that year.

So now it's official: Everybody north, south, east and west of Broadway is miffed at the Rangers' profligate ways. Last month the NHL fined Maple Leafs GM Pat Quinn after he publicly lambasted the Rangers (and other big-spending teams) for handing out those ridiculous sums. Wonder if Honest Pat can now fine the league back.

But it's not just Quinn. He only gives voice to a widespread sentiment. Yes, people count the Stars and the Red Wings among the NHL's filthy rich, but all summer -- and as recently as two days ago -- I've heard from NHL executives expressing everything from annoyance to outrage to fear at the way the Rangers shell out dough. "You start to wonder, Do they even live in the same world as we do?" one Western Conference GM asked me rhetorically last week.

Nothing against these players but the Rangers are flat-out throwing their money around. The dogged Holik is a superb center, no question, but he's not even first liner. Kasparaitis? The Rangers are paying for the kind of big hits they hope will change games in their favor. They'll also be paying again when Kaspar goes to lay a large check and the puck ends up in the net behind him.

These contracts are, of course, nothing out of the ordinary in Sather-land. In his short tenure as Rangers GM, Slats has also opened up the bank to bring in Eric Lindros, take on Pavel Bure and (inexplicably) commit to Vladimir Malakhov. And remember this team still isn't close to being a Stanley Cup contender. An injury to Lindros (and we all know about those) and the Rangers are barely playoff material.

Now the Rangers payroll is more than $70 million a year. Maybe that's just peanuts and Cracker Jacks in baseball, but in hockey that's some serious loonies.

"What makes it all so surreal is that not long ago Slats himself would have been leading the complaints about the giant contracts. I remember talking to Sather one time in the spring or early summer of 2000. He was still (nominally) running the cash-poor Oilers in Edmonton, the team he'd operated on a shoestring for two decades. At that point Sather was still the king of fiscal restraint. Why, in 1998 he'd even gone to Ottawa, the seat of the Canadian government, to discuss the potentially ruinous impact that teams' high-spending could have on the sport.

But by the time of our talk in 2000 Slats was already speaking dreamily of coming to New York, of adding a few diamonds to the soles of his shoes. "After so long doing it the way we've been doing it in Edmonton," Sather said, "it sounds pretty good to be able to go out get players you really want."

Of course, the fallacy was that there was no indication Sather would be suited to running a team he could buy rather than carefully assemble. It's ironic that even with (or perhaps because of) his abundant wealth, Sather has yet to come close to winning the way he did with the Oilers. I'm not talking about the Edmonton dynasty he built in the 1980s -- you couldn't expect him to approach that. Sather hasn't put together a Rangers club worthy of his Edmonton playoff teams of the late 1990s.

Nothing hurts a man's ability to reason more than obscene wealth (just read the papers), and Sather's move to New York guaranteed a loss of some of his faculties. No longer is he finding the inexpensive third-line winger with the high potential, and watching that player blossom over time. No longer is he working the edges of his roster like a wizard. Now he's just writing checks, doing much of what Neil Smith did in his last two years as Rangers GM. He's putting together a fantasy hockey team for one reason: because he can.

No one outside Rangerland (OK, and a some of the bean-counters in the Players Association) is happy about these signings; not even the NHL, which would like nothing more than to have a successful team playing in Madison Square Garden. Hockey fans look at the Rangers and chafe. Cash-strapped GMs lament. And one can only wonder what the ghost of Sather's past would say.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Kostya Kennedy takes sides every Wednesday at CNNSI.com.

 

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