Br4d

Zib is a top 5 2-way C and he has been since last season.  Does everything very well.

BTW, Panarin doesn't like playing with Kakko because a great pass just turns into a pass back to him?

Just wondering.

Get the high picks in the top 6!

It's not like you have 5 years to develop these guys in the NHL.

On 10/6/2022 at 11:39 AM, Cash or Czech said:

Much rather split up the kid line and play Kakko and Laf in the top-6 and give them 20 games to get used to teammates/the position/etc than hoping Kravtsov pans out after having such a lackluster training camp and preseason. There's more efficient ways to use a 20-game "sample period".

Give Lafreniere to Zib-Kreider and give Kakko to Panarin-Trocheck.   That gives the Rangers a good chance of having a very strong top 6.  The rest of the forwards all fit in the bottom 6 somewhere and likely productive in those slots.

GG has a responsibility to develop the young players he is given.  If they are mediocre enmasse then he is not doing his full job.

The kid line is a joke. 

Chytil is a 3rd line center at best at this point in his career.  He might develop further with real support from veteran linemates however his play short the 5-7 game sequence in the playoffs last year suggests that he is a bottom 6 guy. 

Kakko probably has better play in him than we have seen but he is not a driver of success, more like a decent two-way player whose success will be dependent on meshing with the guys around him.  It's not that he doesn't have the tools but he tends to blunder his opportunities and the only way around that is to give him a lot of opportunities until he either figures it out or not.  If he doesn't figure it out he wouldn't be the first guy with good tools who couldn't put the puck in the net.  Not even the first guy on the kid line.

Putting these two guys together is just asking for their collective issues to deep six each other.

Then you have the guy who any rational NHL team would have had playing on the 1st or 2nd line last year.  He would have been getting PP minutes anywhere else.  Instead he is hanging out with the misfits (apparently again) and the Rangers offense is suffering because of it.

This spring as we look at Lafreniere's 20 goals and 17 assists at the trading deadline and it suddenly becomes clear to management that they've bungled it again the odds are pretty good that Lafreniere is the guy that goes in the Kane trade.  He'll already be looking around the league trying to figure out which offer sheets he will draw and the #1 overall pick a few years ago who looks like a woefully mismanaged (mismangled) but productive player is going to draw offers the Rangers won't want to match.

But go ahead GG, do your thing and promote a few of your guys into minutes they shouldn't see.  All it's going to cost you is the best prospect on your roster.

It's really depressing to see the kid line apparently in the plans again.

If the Rangers think that Laf will not draw an offer sheet next year they are deluding themselves.  Can't hide him on the 3rd line and watch him produce 3rd line numbers and keep him also.

96-97

Was the last year that Messier and Leetch were both still star caliber and Gretzky was just fun to watch.  I wish I had paid more attention to the Oilers in Gretzky's early years.  We're never going to see a talent like him again. 

Seriously, with the 1st round pick it shouldn't take 3-4 years to develop the player.  Anybody with the talent to go that high should be in the NHL in a couple of seasons.  If you can't do this regularly you should be adjusting your scouting and your development teams until you can.

After the 1st round it's a different situation but with that first pick you should be getting somebody who is close to ready to go.

It's so much easier waiting for the first game after a long run in the playoffs the year before.

It feels like Game 6 was just a month ago.

The King is back!

Long live the King!

Dolan's been a bad owner for the Knicks because he thinks he understands basketball.

He's been very neutral for the Rangers because he knows he knows nothing about hockey.

I haven't skated in 41 years but I would definitely be there.

43 minutes ago, LindG1000 said:

 

The problem with this thinking is that the overwhelming likelihood behind each of those outcomes rests heavily on the guys due contracts. If we make the playoffs and make a run, it's most likely because those guys due deals took a step forward - good problem. If we get blown out in round 1, it's likely because they didn't. And if we miss the playoffs, something went catastrophically wrong with injuries AND those guys didn't take the step.

 

There is no cap crunch if Lafreniere and Chytil produce like they did for most of last year and Miller looks anything less than he did last year. There's also probably no significant playoff run.

There's no cap crunch in that scenario but the rebuild is stalled and we lose a prime year out of the established players already playing at a high level.  In other words we're in a worse position than we were at the end of this season.

I really wish the Rangers had made a choice at defense this off-season, probably a Lindgren trade, and gotten an established top 6 wing to balance the cap a bit better.  I'm not in the dump Kakko camp but I'd rather have seen the Rangers trade him for a reliable 3C and move Chytil to LW on the 3rd line this season.  Goodrow or Gauthier could have played RW on that line.

In other words I'd rather the Rangers weren't relying on 4 prospects working out to give them a solid top 9 with two of the guys required to play in the top 6.  It just seems so unwieldy at this point - like Zibanejad and Kreider and Panarin aren't going to have enough help (again) unless the Rangers get very lucky.

For me the real question is not next year's cap crunch as much as did the Rangers do enough to set the team up for this season?

If we make the playoffs again and make a run the cap crunch at the end of it will be bearable.

If we wind up on the cusp of the playoffs and then get blown out in the first round, well the cap crunch next year could feel really bad.

If we don't make the playoffs the cap crunch is just going to suck no matter how you look at it.

4 hours ago, Pete said:

And yet here you are in three or four different threads talking about how good K'Andre is... 

Good prospect is not star.  I do think K'Andre through two seasons is on the best pace a Ranger has been on in awhile.  He's big and has his head in the game.  It's just a question of whether he will clean up the small gaps in his play and become a very good or great player instead of just a solid top 4 guy.  He's huge and if he puts it all together he's going to be great.

Lafreniere is in a similar position.  He still has some gaps but there is no shortage of effort on his part. He needs to turn it up some this year or he's going to become hard for the Rangers to hold on to, particularly if K'Andre steps it up.

We should probably do a list at some point of who the best players who have been drafted in the 1st round each year are and where they were drafted.

The Rangers have now had a #1 overall pick and another guy up near the top.  Those are the guys who have the best chance to be very good right off the bat and with the Rangers it just hasn't happened.

On 8/10/2022 at 9:10 AM, siddious said:

Current players* sure

 

I don’t know how far back you want to go but they’ve had decent success drafting;

 

2014, 2015 & 2016 I guess you can call bad drafts (I would love to compare to how other teams did those years to get the full picture but I also don’t care enough to do that) but you’re basically getting 2-3 players who made it to the show in each draft - keeping in mind a lot of these years the picks were late in the rounds too.

 

Who are the star players the Rangers have drafted in the 1st round over the last decade?

I could be wrong but I think they are 0-fer-10 at this point in actually drafting a major star in the 1st round.  This is a *huge* failure on the part of the scouting and drafting apparatchiks on the Rangers the last decade.

The last star the Rangers drafted in the 1st round who became a star with the Rangers was Chris Kreider in 2009!

The house cleaning in the scouting department is long overdue.

With the exception of Shesty and Kreider the Rangers best players all came in from outside the organization.  You can't do that for long without getting capstrung and the Rangers are capstrung right now.

Trouba is the right guy for the job.

Leads by example and gives up his body whenever the play requires it.

I think it's an iffy deal for Calgary but it does resolve the question of whether they will be sellers at the trade deadline.

If the cap expands by 15-20% over the course of the deal Calgary made a good deal.  if for any reason it does not, well they'll be unhappy later in the deal.

Graves made Kakko look like Guy Lafleur by comparison.

Definitely Graves.  Went from two-time disappointment to the guy who threw his stick up in the air at the horn in '94.

How many of the Rangers 1st and 2nd round prospects of recent years are sunk costs at this point?

The scouting department overhaul may be based on the organizations interpretation of the question above.

The Rangers have done a particularly bad job of scouting frontline talent in the draft over the last decade.  Good at finding defensemen and pretty poor at finding impact forwards.

Change is generally good.

13 hours ago, Pete said:

How much 19 or 20 year old Zib did you watch? 

https://www.silversevensens.com/2013/2/9/3968402/top-25-under-25-no-6-mika-zibanejad

Everybody thought Zibanejad belonged at the NHL level.  Injuries aside he was seen as an excellent prospect who was doing a lot of the things you need to do to play in the NHL.

17 minutes ago, Pete said:

More "he hasn't done X by Y so Z".

 

And yet so many players buck that trend. 

I'm not looking at numbers particularly.  I'm looking at Kakko and nothing suggests that he is going to be a great player at this point.

And really many players do not buck the trend.  A few buck the trend and then we can point at them and "look it can happen."

As an example: Zibanejad at 19 and 20 didn't look like a great player except for brief flashes here and there.  Then he stepped up in his 21 year and was a solid player, scoring 20 goals.  He had established that he could play at the NHL level, sometimes quite well.  He also had weirdness to deal with at the start due to the NHL lockout.

Out of Kakko we've had very little to go on so far.  Basically his big strength right now is that the Rangers have the puck more often when he is on the ice than not and while that is a good thing it doesn't show up as much in the +/- as it should because he's neither a scorer or playmaker based on what we have seen so far.  He could break out at 21 like Zibanejad did but by this point in his career Zibanejad had already established that he was an NHL player - the only question was whether he was a really good player or just a roster spot in the bottom 6.

Maybe Kakko's career would have advanced further at this point if the Rangers had a way to send him back to Finland in his 18 season the way the Senators returned Zibanejad to Sweden when the NHL just looked to fast for him at 18.