Ilya Kovalchuk is Rangers’ most obvious step forward

Regarding the Rangers, in the midst of organizational meetings at Glen Sather’s spread in La Quinta:

1. The selection of a coach to replace Alain Vigneault will inform the club’s player personnel decisions even as the evaluation process proceeds this week. Management is committed to adding a phalanx of more reliably competitive north-south players to the mix. That should be understood by whomever remains a candidate to take over behind the bench.

2. Quibbling over whether the Rangers are entering a “complete rebuild” or “aggressive retool” represents a mindless waste of energy. Orchestrating a plunge toward the bottom would be a self-destructive exercise.

For while the Penguins, Kings and Blackhawks did win Cups after scraping the bottom of the barrel, the league is filled with perennial bottom-feeders. Fact is, the four teams with the most top-five draft picks since 2004 — the Oilers, Islanders, Avalanche and Hurricanes— have also endured a decade of shared dysfunction.

The Blueshirts need to construct a pipeline of prospects through the draft or trades they can add to a competitive nucleus. If the idea is to turn every marketable roster asset into a draft pick, good luck to them. If the idea is to turn away every veteran free agent, the hike back to relevancy — much less, contention — will be unnecessarily extended.

3. It is vital for general manager Jeff Gorton and his staff to develop tools that will allow the Rangers to determine and exploit players’ market value. The analytical revolution that has altered the dynamics of Major League Baseball has not yet quite reached the NHL, but it most surely will.

see also

Rangers next coach must find way to fix the defensive chaos

Regarding the Rangers, about to embark on their first visit…

One summer, maybe not this one and maybe not next one, but soon, hockey free agency will resemble baseball free agency and teams, rather than players, will establish the market for all but perhaps the most elite handful.

To that extent, Broadway’s team must not only be in position to capitalize on the movement but be among its leaders. This is where the franchise’s enormous revenue streams can give the organization the advantage denied by the hard cap.

4. It would be a significant mistake if the Rangers do not pursue and woo Ilya Kovalchuk, the most impactful free agent on the market who will not demand a contract commitment of five, six or seven years. And that probably applies to more than just this year.

Kovalchuk is 35, coming off five low-tread seasons in the KHL. He is the kind of veteran difference-maker not likely to become available to the Rangers for years, and exactly the kind of attacking, shoot-first, north-south forward the team lacks. He plays with a strut and with a chip on his shoulder that is absent in pretty much everyone who survived the purge.

He scored 14 shorthanded goals his first two seasons in New Jersey and emerged as a go-to favorite of the notoriously safety-first coach Jacques Lemaire. I will never be convinced that the Devils would not have won the Stanley Cup in 2012 if Kovalchuk had been healthy for the final instead of playing on essentially one leg in the six-game defeat by the Kings.

Kovalchuk competes. He scores, and he leads, and if you question his commitment in the aftermath of his “retirement” from the Devils, that is your mistake. He is the perfect fit for this team that is looking for a peg on which it can hang a new core. He would become a vital piece in short-cutting a building process that can and often does take forever. It would be a shame if the Rangers forfeit this opportunity to sign a player who for years has wanted to play on Broadway.

5. The burden of justifying the trade in which the Rangers sent Ryan McDonagh and J.T. Miller to the Lightning cannot fall on 20-year-old defenseman Libor Hajek. He didn’t identify himself as the one asset for whom the Rangers would be willing to be part with the pair of assets who have been instrumental in Tampa Bay’s advance to the conference finals.

But, boy, the organization had better be right on Hajek. This doesn’t mean he should be rushed to New York in order to validate the deal. In fact, doing so would represent malpractice. But when you have pieces like McDonagh and Miller and could have waited until the offseason to deal either or both if offers were not attractive enough on deadline day, a mistake is no more affordable than one would be with, say, the ninth overall selection in the draft.