GO DOWN IN HISTORY
Sudden collapse recalls & warns of '75-76 Rangers
WHEN the Yankees got off to sluggish starts during the final years of the Core Four, the first reference point was always 1965, the season the dynastic MantleMarisFord teams grew old overnight and baseball life in The Bronx changed as we knew it.
Historical comparisons obviously are made in the abstract, because teams and personnel through the ages are independent of one another other than the commonality of the logo and the memories of those to bear witness.
Still, these last three weeks of Rangers hockey — or, perhaps, more accurately, of antiRangers hockey as we have come to know it — brings back haunting memories of 197576, the season the Giacomin-Gilbert-RatellePark teams disintegrated before our very eyes.
These Rangers of recent vintage always have seemed the linear descendants of the Emile Francis clubs of the late ’60s and early ’70s that played the game elegantly, featured a core group of estimable homegrown talent, and fell just short of the Stanley Cup despite otherwise notable success over a sustained period of time.
Those teams were together longer (no surprise in the prefree agent era) and suffered more playoff heartbreak, but still, the com parison holds. You know what, the two most popular players in franchise history not to play for the 1994 Cup winners are the goaltenders from then and now in Ed Giacomin and Henrik Lundqvist.
The preliminaryround loss to the Islanders in 1975 — J.P. Parise at 0:11 of overtime — might have been a harbinger, and changes including the exits of Vic Hadfield, Ted Irvine, Rod Seiling, Jim Neilson and Dale Rolfe already had been effected. And Giacomin was 36, Jean Ratelle was 35 and Rod Gilbert was 34 (but Brad Park only 27) when the season started. Still, nobody could have foreseen the hockey calamity that would unfold late in the first month of the season, when the Rangers, who had gotten off to an uneven 321 start with the newly acquired, young John Davidson sharing time with Giacomin, hit skid row.
From seemingly out of nowhere and with JD in nets, there was an Oct. 22, 91 loss in Buffalo to the emerging Sabres. Three days later, Giacomin lost to the Islanders 71 at the Coliseum. The next night, it was a 72 Giacomin defeat in Philadelphia to the twotime defending champ Flyers.
And, incredibly, it was over. The era was over. Just like that. Giacomin would never play an other game for the Blueshirts, waived on Oct. 31 to the Red Wings. A split of two games later (including the 64 defeat to the Red Wings on the Nov. 2 “Eddie! Eddie! night,” that was it for Park and Ratelle, shipped off to the Bruins for the hated Phil Esposito (and the feeling was mutual) and the disregarded Carol Vadnais.
That was that. Soon enough, Emile would be gone as well and the Rangers would become quite unrecognizable playing in unfamiliar uniforms and with unfamiliar personnel under incoming general managercoach John Ferguson.
Again. This isn’t quite that. It is the same place, but a different time and a different era. This team is much younger. There are nomove clauses. There is a cap.
Lundqvist, Ryan McDonagh, Derick Brassard (or Derek Stepan) and Chris Kreider aren’t going to be traded to Anaheim — at the Garden on Tuesday for the final game before the Christmas recess — in exchange for Ryan Getzlaf (one goal this season), Cam Fowler, Carl Hagelin and John Gibson (even if the cap numbers work) in the type of blockbuster 40 years later that would shake the moorings of the franchise’s foundation. Are they? It’s just, well, it’s just that watching this team the last three weeks has been like watching the 197576 team when, unaccountably and unexpectedly, an era came to an end so quickly that it was essen tially impossible to process.
Of course, it never became 1965 for the Core Four Yankees, who always managed to win their 90plus games (89 once), even if they could only win one World Series after 2000.
So that downfall of Francis doesn’t have to become this for the Glen SatherJeff Gorton-Alain Vigneault hierarchy. That past does not have to be prologue for these Rangers. But there is no time like the present for Lundqvist, McDonagh & Co. — flailing in the quicksand of 151 and 392 — to ensure that it does not.