A Testament to How Winning Can Ruin a Franchise

To all you aspiring GMs out there, whether it be in hockey or any other sport, you may want to pay close attention to this article.

Winning is every team's goal, because there is no joy whatsoever in losing. I'm not saying that winning is bad, all I'm saying is that if you don't pay attention while you're winning, pretty soon your franchise will be in turmoil and losing seasons will mount.

An unfortunate example of this is the New York Rangers. Although they have fixed things now, from 1997-2004 (a.k.a. "The Dark Ages"), the franchise went from glorious Stanley Cup winner and contender to the laughingstock of the NHL. This drop in quality didn't even happen over a long period of time, but instead took only three short years.

So sit back and enjoy the ride...

The best season in New York Ranger history was a magical one, 1993-94. The team cruised through the entire season without much of a fight from anyone in the standings. All was going well as the trade deadline approached. Now you would think a team that had all but clinched first place by the deadline would not need to make any trades.

But you would have thought wrong. The Rangers ended up trading young superstar Tony Amonte to the Blackhawks in exchange for veterans Stephane Matteau and Brian Noonan.

At first, the trade paid dividends, as Matteau would go on to score two double-overtime goals against the Devils in the Eastern Conference Finals, including the most famous goal in Ranger history.

But in the long run, was it worth it? Well, before answering consider this: Amonte would go on to score 332 more goals in his NHL career, while Matteau would score only seven goals as a Ranger in two more full seasons.

This was the first in a series of bad moves for the Rangers that year.

The second bad move the Rangers made at the deadline was a trade that still boggles my mind to this day—the deal that sent Hall of Fame goal scorer Mike Gartner to Toronto in exchange for Glen Anderson.

Neil Smith felt this move was necessary because thought that bringing in a player with Cup-winning experience and one already familiar with captain Mark Messier would guarantee success.

Was it worth it? Well, Mike Gartner would go on to score 97 more goals, while Glen Anderson would score four goals before retiring.

As we move into the next season and after the lockout, which caused a shortened 48-game season to be played, the Rangers were now certain that youth was not the way to win championships. For the next ten years, it was an ideology that would cost them dearly.

At the end of the 1994-95 season, the Rangers made one of their worst trades in franchise history, when they sent Sergei Zubov to the Penguins in exchange for Luc Robitaille and Ulf Samuelsson.

Once again, the Rangers thought nothing about the future because of their "Win Now" mentality. Although the trade wasn't a complete bust, Zubov is still playing successfully in the NHL, while Samuelsson and Robitaille are long-since retired.

In the 1995-96 season, the Rangers, once again a playoff lock, would still feel the need to sell the farm and add so-called playoff experience to the team in order to "win it now".

The Rangers sent Mattias Norstrom and Ian Lapperiere to the Kings in exchange for once-brilliant-but-now-fading-away superstar Jarri Kurri. Although it was not the worst trade, Norstrom and Laperriere still continue playing to this day, while Kurri scored four goals as a Ranger before leaving.

Once again, the Rangers sold some of the farm only to not win the Stanley Cup for a second straight season.

The 1996-97 season would be the most successful for the Rangers following the Stanley Cup win in 1994, but, as good as it was, fans had no idea what was about to happen in the following ten years.

But first, let's recap: the Rangers signed the best player of all-time in Wayne Gretzky so he could be reunited with buddy Mark Messier. But instead of signing scoring wingers to complement them, they would stick to the "win now" mentality and sign slow, older defensemen such as Bruce Driver and Pat Flatley.

The team would advance to the conference finals and call it a successful season, but the next ten years would be hell, as their mentality, coupled with bad moves, would come back to haunt them.

Since the Rangers almost had a taste of the Finals once again, Neil Smith carried on trying to sign and acquire every big-name free agent he possibly could, no matter how old and no matter the price (which often was parting with budding youth).

When Joe Sakic hit the open market, the Rangers offered him an exorbitant amount of money, basically showing Mark Messier the door in the process. All looked well as Sakic was about to sign the contract, but then Colorado matched the offer and he remained with the team.

The Rangers then ran to Messier hoping he would sign with them, but he was insulted by this move by Neil Smith and left the Rangers' franchise all together to sign in Vancouver, playing three of his worst seasons there.

The Rangers frantically searched the open market for an older superstar and found Pat LaFontaine. Although still a skilled player, he was injury prone and way past his prime. However, since they needed a scoring winger to complement Gretzky, they signed him to a massive deal—but to no one's surprise, he got injured 67 games into the season and retired shortly after.

With their lone scoring winger gone, rather then use skillful youth already on the team like Marc Savard, they stuck to their old habits and used players like Mike Keane, Kevin Stevens, Brian Skrudland, and Bill Berg, all of whom where nowhere near capable of carrying a team.

For the next few seasons, the Rangers would come to have some very talented and youthful players such as Marc Savard, Mike Knuble, and Mathieu Schnieder, three players who could actually carry a team.

But in the span of a year, all three were traded away. The players acquired for them are laughable: Jamie Lundmark, Jan Hlavac, and Rob Dimaio.

Where are they now? Exactly.

It still boggles the mind today that a team would continue to not give in and say that they made mistakes, but rather keep on going with the exact same mentality that started to make the team the laughingstock of the league.

Combine the aforementioned trades and ones yet to come with horrible scouting and drafting, and you have a disaster on your hands.

With the new millennium approaching, Rangers fans were excited thinking that the three-year stretch of listless hockey would end, but it would actually carry on for four more atrocious years. The Rangers would continue to sign aging superstars, even after Glen Sather took over for Smith.

Players to don the Ranger uniform over the course of those next four years still make me cringe: Valeri Kamensky, Todd Harvey, Rich Pilon, Kirk McLean, Igor Ulanov, Vladimir Malakhov, and Boris Mironov.

It wasn't until the 2003-04 season, exactly ten years after the glorious Cup win, that Sather finally figured it out. He began to dismantle the franchise and trade away all aging veterans for youth and draft picks.

Turns out it worked, and in the following three seasons, they got the combination right by mixing stars and rookies, young and old, and not just stacking a team with stars.

So as you look back on the last ten seasons and think about all that I've said, keep in mind that it is great to win, but not at certain prices. As whatever team you root for wins right now and you enjoy the glory, take some time and look at it from a distance.

You may want to ask questions or perhaps quietly ponder, "Was it worth it?" They say a chance at a championship may come only once, but if the Rangers stuck with what they had and didn't go on the course explained in the this article, who knows, maybe they would have had another chance at glory.