I didn’t hate Tom quite yet, but I had built up a pretty strong dislike or him since around mid-november. He turned my team into the new jersey devels, but he didn’t even manage that correctly. He turned the team into some low-rent expansion team clone of the new jersey devils. Instead of the cult of jaques, we had fiveinthepicture. The evil genius could turn a pack of interchangable forwards into something greater than the sum of their parts, Tom managed to turn them into less. Proof enough is Fritsche, who was an afterthought here, but in minnie under hocky’s version of asmodius himself is scoring left and right.

You can say that the players are on Sather, and you are right, some of it is, but THIS is the team that Tom wanted. He was player personnel before head coach. He HAD input into who is here this year and who is not. The personalities are gone – the jagers, the shanahans. Everyone has drunk the kool-aide this year, and it’s a poochscrew.

If he’s not in the lineup on the second line or not on the Rangers next year, I don’t know how you’d be able to argue that he’s such a good player as that will be two coaches who weren’t high on him.

I also don’t 100% buy the argument that playing with Jagr did nothing for Prucha’s production those first two years – case in point, Dubinksy. Good players can do what they do with anybody. I know a bunch of people will go with the infallible argument “Prucha’s awesome see, look at his numbers now” with the flip side being “Renney ruined him”. But if you’re going to tout Prucha as a 30+ goal scoring machine, which isn’t even close to being an average player, then he has to be able to do it with whoever he’s on the ice with – no excuses.