GLEN Sather’s decision to use an amnesty buyout on Bobby Holik and thus clear $6.726M of Rangers cap space in each of the next two seasons was justifiable, if not necessary, given the immediate hopeless state of the franchise.
But that does not alter the fact that it also represented the culmination of one of the greatest failures of his five years as the Rangers’ hockey czar, which, considering the mounting-by-the-moment list of serious blunders committed by Sather’s administration, is really quite something.
The mistake was not signing Holik to the now-infamous five-year, $45M contract on July 1, 2002, when he became an unrestricted free agent after nine seasons as a Devil. The mistake was signing him to that contract without ever understanding who Holik was as a player and what he represented both as an individual and an athlete. The mistake was signing the league’s best checking center and then not using him in that role. The mistake was signing a player who thrived on being matched against the opposition’s top center, then employing a series of coaches – Sather included – who did not believe in line-matching.
In the 146 games he played for the Blueshirts over two seasons, Holik was used maybe 20 or 25 times in the role in which he had established himself as an intimidating presence in New Jersey – to where he is as likely as not to return.
Sather never understood Holik, never appreciated Holik, never really made the effort to get to know Holik. And, tough hockey marine that he likes to fancy himself, Sather couldn’t handle the truth when it came out of Holik’s mouth after one inferior and undisciplined loss after another. Sather never thought Holik behaved like a good soldier.
The whole thing was another fiasco, in a line under Sather’s tenure that, in fact, he added to this week by not buying out Darius Kasparaitis and by qualifying Tom Poti. If it is inexplicable that the Rangers kept Kasparaitis, who at $3.344M is currently the eighth-highest paid NHL defenseman and will take up $3.243 of cap space in each of the next three years, it is incomprehensible that the team is spending $2.356M on Poti, who has played passionless hockey since coming from Edmonton in exchange for Mike York in 2002.
Even when Sather gets something right, as he did with the buyout of Holik, somehow he still manages to get more wrong. Welcome to the Rangers’ world.