[text_output]It’s interesting to point out what Jeff Gorton has done for the Rangers. He’s traded a guy like Derek Stepan and Annti Raanta to get what turned out to be Lias Andersson and Anthony DeAngelo.

While the jury is still out on what we will see from both DeAngelo and Andersson, a logical explanation is that this team needed to move on from Stepan before his full no-trade clause came into effect.

Trading him is what needed to be done so we wouldn’t be stuck with cap hit.

Fine, fair.

That isn’t the only traded that has been contested under the Gorton era. The trade with Carolina that gave us Eric Staal has been seen as one of the biggest goofs in recent Ranger memory. More because of how management allowed Alain Vigneault to handle him. Yes, you can say that the Rangers did not need to trade for Eric Staal and you’d be 100% right on that point.

The issue is how they used Eric Staal during his duration here in New York. He wasn’t in his natural center position and he was put on the wing with a player that didn’t complement him well, a second-year forward in Kevin Hayes who was trying to find his way around in his first year and lacked the confidence that we see from him now.

That lack of trust and using the player based on instinct of past performance hurt the Rangers chances of trying to re-sign him if he wanted to come back (I didn’t want him back), and most importantly showed how Vigneault handled deployment of certain players.

Let’s move on from that and look at something else. Vigneault is our head coach still. He’s been given tools to ruin this team’s chemistry, ruin everything that this team has done in the past. Sure, Vigneault has given us playoff berths, and a Stanley Cup final appearance with a team he had no input over, but let’s look past that, right?

To me the biggest thing that stands out by Gorton’s stint as Rangers general manager is what he has done, and what he has allowed this coaching staff to do, without putting his foot down and giving his staff a true direction of how this team should be laid out and given the best roster there is to win.

In the end it is the coach’s final say on how he wants the team to be constructed on the ice. What should happen is a little more voice from management, especially from Gorton. He’s given Vigneault great players. Most recently, he gave him coveted free-agent defenseman Kevin Shattenkirk. A great partner for Ryan McDonagh, only to be wasted on the third pairing and not used to his full potential.

Isn’t it the general manager’s job to step in and intervene on issues like that? You’re paying Shattenkirk a pretty penny to be a third-pairing defenseman and a power play specialist.

There’s more examples of wanting to see Gorton step in to push the directive of the team on certain players. Pavel Buchnevich and Henrik Lundqvist are prime examples of guys who should be getting the help from management. A 35-year old goaltender is on pace for 68 games, where he’s seeing many nights with 40+ shots against him. A young Russian winger who gets yo-yoed between the first and fourth lines and gets sheltered minutes, because the coach doesn’t trust him in their own end.

Let the kid make mistakes and learn how to improve on those mistakes, it’ll help him become a better player.

That’s just bad management for allowing a coach to throw all the hard work done to improve the team away, because it doesn’t fit his narrative or doesn’t fit his game plan. In the end, you’re only successful as your upper management. Think of it as your day to day job, your boss is only good as his boss, so if his boss is telling him to do something that in the end is terrible, then your boss is going to be terrible too.

With the Rangers though, it seems that while Gorton might be a good boss, Vigneault is being insubordinate towards him and doing as he pleases. We as fans see it by his lineup decisions. Someone clearly needs to step in here and shake things up.

We as fans aren’t the “dumb, uneducated” fan of years past. Social media has changed that, the internet has changed that. The access we get from the league and their teams in a way has changed that too. YouTube changed that. I can easily watch a video on someone and can tell you ways that Vigneault has ruined him. That idea, mentality from management around the league has to stop.

Fans are more educated (or, at the very least, have easier access to become more educated) and can see through the garbage management and coaching staffs give us. It’s no surprise that the smart fan wants Vigneault gone, because he’s done nothing with a lineup on paper that could do so much more.

It’s also no surprise that some of these same smart fans are wanting Gorton gone. He’s enabled Vigneault’s awful behavior, and as of now, hasn’t done anything to show us he’s willing to change his coach for someone who’d fit under his philosophy.

If the Rangers were serious about a rebuild, then maybe keeping Vigneault makes sense for now, he can push them even further down and most importantly can make the same bone-headed decisions that he’s made his entire coaching tenure.

It’ll be an important offseason for the Rangers. In terms of what they need to look at in the Free Agent market and most importantly, what they decide with the coaching staff. The right thing to do is to get rid of the coaching staff and move on.

You can argue that this wasn’t Gorton’s coach, this was Glen Sather’s. Fine, whatever you want to say about that.

I’m going to bring up the boss analogy again. Your bosses boss gets fired and replaced by someone else, thinking it was your bosses boss that stunk up the place, when in actuality it was your boss.

Now the newer guy comes in, realizes this and now has to sit on his hands and deal with the fact that the person before him, had a concussion that day and hired someone incompetent? I don’t think the real world works that way.

In the end, the Rangers management team needs to sit around together and have a tough talk. A talk that will make them realize things that they probably didn’t consider.

Until then, Jeff Gorton has not done the job as general manager that I expected.

Written By: Shawn Taggart

[/text_output]