No, I'm Not Saying What You Think I'm Saying...

Tonight's 2-1 loss to Florida in regulation (in a "4-point game," no less) goes to show that if you sign 2nd-line players to 1st-line money and 4th-D-men to 1st-pairing money, you won't be able to score goals or stop an onslaught, no matter who is behind the bench and how good your goalie is.

The Rangers wasted cap space by signing 2nd-line centers Scott Gomez and Chris Drury to money Rick Nash, Marian Hossa, and Ilya Kovalchuk should be making. Ryan Whitney makes less than Michal Rozsival, and Zdeno Chara makes only a million more than Wade Redden.

And this is going to be the same for a long time, unless GM Glen Sather admits his mistakes and tries to take what he can for these players. It's not entirely a knock on the players - although even they'll admit they aren't playing up to their ability - but they are eating up so much cap space for such a long time that there is no light at the end of this tunnel.

Sather has admitted mistakes in the past. He signed Matt Cullen to a crazy deal, Cullen couldn't take NY, and he shipped him back to Carolina. Aaron Ward isn't on Broadway anymore, either. Adam Hall is gone. (I realize as I'm typing this that the only year he recognized mistakes from where 2006-07, also the year he let Petr Sykora leave for Edmonton when he wanted to be a Ranger. Sorry to get off topic.)

He needs to ditch some of these contracts if only for the cap room. I like Gomez as a person, but wouldn't you, as a fan, rather see the Rangers put his $7M cap hit into a proven scorer like Kovalchuk or Nash, or into a big defender like Chara or Jay Bouwmeester? Or maybe divided into a $4M player and a $3M player?

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The team did seem more "attacking" today with John Tortorella behind the bench, but...

a) He has only coached 2 games now.

b) You can only squeeze so much juice from a dry lemon.

c) He had Gomez, Markus Naslund, et al, on the ice with the time winding down. Tom Renney would've done that, also. Same as for the power play - basically the same guys. Yes, they went 1-4 in Toronto, but they only had 2 shots on goal in 4 power plays!

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What's worse? Missing the playoffs and getting a 1st round draft pick in the top 14, or selling some future to barely make the playoffs, lose in the first round to a superior New Jersey or Boston team, and getting a pick around 16-22?

I'm not rooting for them to lose - no way. But I do hope that if they make the playoffs they don't sell off what they have in their system just for 2 extra home games. The Islanders did that with Ryan Smyth and failed the same year that Atlanta did it with Keith Tkachuk.

We all know what will happen if they get a draft pick in the 1st round though - they'll waste it.

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Crazy that after a 5-0 start and a pretty solid first two months (I think they were 11-2-1 at one point) we are talking about what happens if they miss the playoffs.

I told you those early points would be huge in February, March, and April. Imagine if they started 2-2-1? They'd be out of the Top 8 right now.