If the New York Rangers want to win their first Stanley Cup since 1994, they may need to make a deal like the one that made that year's victory possible.
Throughout the Rick Nash derby, the general perception has been that Columbus Blue Jackets general manager Scott Howson's asking price for his unhappy star has been too high. With names like Carolina Hurricanes center Jeff Skinner and San Jose Sharks center Logan Couture being bandied about - players who are already putting up comparable numbers at a younger age - it's hard to argue too much. However, it's not like the Rangers haven't given up top prospects and roster players before and made out like bandits in the end.
The October 1991 trade that brought Mark Messier to the Rangers in exchange for Louis DeBrusk, Bernie Nicholls and Steven Rice looks, in retrospect, like absolute highway robbery. The Rangers got the captain who would lead them to their first Stanley Cup in 54 years, and the Edmonton Oilers went to one more conference final before enduring a four-year playoff drought. At the time, however, the Rangers paid a price for Messier that isn't all that different from what the Blue Jackets are asking now...at least, not where the Rangers are concerned.
In Nicholls, the Oilers got a player who had scored 73 points (25 goals, 48 assists) in 71 games the season before, and had four seasons of 95 points or more on his resume during his tenure with the Los Angeles Kings. He would average a point per game for Edmonton in 1991-92, and share the team lead in playoff goals as the Oilers advanced to the conference finals before losing to the Chicago Blackhawks. He was traded again the following January by a rebuilding Edmonton team, but remained a productive NHL player until the end of his career.
The aptly named DeBrusk had been the Rangers' third-round pick in the 1989 draft, and in 1991 was coming off of a point-per game junior hockey season with the London Knights in the OHL. In the pros, however, he was primarily a gritty player, racking up 1161 penalty minutes in 401 career NHL games. 124 of those minutes came in 1991-92 for Edmonton, but he didn't play in the playoffs.
The key, however, was Rice, the Rangers' first-round pick in 1989. When the Rangers included him as part of the package for Messier in 1991, he was coming off of a season that saw him average better than two points a game in the OHL for Kitchener, score four goals in eight games in the AHL for Binghamton, and score two goals in as many Stanley Cup Playoff games for the Rangers to top it all off. As it turned out, those were the last Stanley Cup Playoff games that Rice would ever play. Although he starred for Edmonton's AHL affiliate in Cape Breton, Rice played just 31 games in the NHL over the Oilers over the next two years, scoring two goals and handing out five assists. He had something of a breakthrough in 1993-94, with 32 points in 63 games, but he never panned out the way the Oilers expected when they acquired him.
The Rangers don't have a Nicholls in the fold to trade away, although given how rare point-per-game players are in the modern NHL - Evgeni Malkin was the only 100-point scorer this past season, compared to nine in 1990-91 - a player like Derek Stepan or Brandon Dubinsky might be comparable in the current league. However, there's no question that in 1991, Rice was very much the kind of hot prospect that Chris Kreider is right now, and since Kreider is one of the players that the Rangers are unwilling to give up in a trade for Nash, general manager Glen Sather may want to reconsider that position and look back to the Messier trade.
Make no mistake: Nash isn't Messier, not by a longshot. By the time Messier arrived on Broadway, he had more Stanley Cups on his résumé (five) than Nash has playoff games (four). Nash wouldn't be coming into New York to be a leader, as the Rangers already have plenty of them in Ryan Callahan, Brad Richards, Dan Girardi and Marc Staal. That having been said, however, if Nash were to come to New York, he could be the missing piece the Rangers need.
The indications from Kreider thus far are that he is the real deal, and will go on to be much more significant as an NHL player than Steven Rice. If he becomes a star after being traded by the Rangers, it will go down as a mistake, unless Nash helps the Rangers win their fifth Stanley Cup. It's hard to fault Sather for not giving in to Howson's demands thus far, but it's not as easy a decision as one might think.
