New York Needs More Writers To Make Rangers, Islanders, Devils Great

The New York media makes it look like the management and players are the problem with the New York Rangers. I'd say it's the media. There aren't enough hockey writers in New York City and not nearly enough space for hockey in the New York Times, The Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, The Lower Hudson Journal, and so on.

Sure, Pierre LeBrun is a big gun, covering hockey in New York for ESPN;  the New York Post has Larry Brooks and Jay Greenburg;  the New York Times has Stu Hackel, Lyn Zinser, Jeff Z. Klein; Newsday has Steve Zipay, Mark Hermann, and Katie Strang; the New York Daily News has Vic Ziegel, Michael Obernauer, and Kristie Ackert; the Lower Hudson Journal has Rick Carpiniello; and Ira Podel of AP gets a lot of hockey stories into lots of papers, along with Matt Aug of AHN.

Stan Fischler, Kenny Albert, and others write about the Rangers on NHL.com and MSG.com.

That's an impressive short list with some famous names but it is not nearly enough. There are three NHL teams in the city with the Rangers, the Islanders, and the New Jersey Devils just 10 miles away.

The other NHL cities have just one team but some of them have much more hockey coverage, and not just the Canadian cities with NHL teams. The Big Apple should follow the example of its closest Canuck rivals and devote even more page space to hockey than they do in Montreal and Toronto.

TV and radio coverage is also sadly lacking in the media centre of the USA.

New York with three teams gives less attention to hockey than in much smaller cities, such as Toronto and Montreal. Toronto is dreaming of getting a second NHL team and already has enough hockey writers to handle ten. Montreal devotes even more attention to the Canadiens.

It seems like the Montreal Canadiens, despite this season, have been a great team forever. The Toronto Maple Leafs have to go back further in history to find greatness. New York City deserves another hockey dynasty and its handful of hockey writers can argue about the best way to build it but I say "If you write it, they will come!"

There should be pages of hockey coverage in the Times, Post, News, Newsday, and the rest of them every day of the hockey season. Each of them should devote three times as much space to hockey as they do in the Montreal Gazette or the Toronto Star. With that level of scrutiny, all three teams would always be better by far.

The New York Rangers should be more like the Detroit Red Wings, winning year after year, with one great team after another.

New York City needs a hockey magazine like The Hockey News and, of course, radio and TV stations should be broadcasting every game, all season. To make the Rangers, Islanders, and Devils dynasties, New York City has to become as hockey-mad as Hockeytown or a small Canadian city.

There are big rivalries between the Rangers, Islanders, and Devils, but they should be huge, like the rivalry between the two teams in Ontario. If Toronto gets a second team, you can be sure the rivalry between the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Vaughan Coyotes, or whoever, will be so huge that small forests in Northern Ontario will be sacrificed to make enough newsprint for all the coverage it will generate.

How did I get to be the No. 1 writer for the New York Rangers on Bleacher Report? That's insane! Sure, I wrote 400 articles in three months, mostly about the Rangers, but there should be one hundred guys ahead of me.