COMMENTARY : Ranger Trade Gives Messier Shot at Another Stanley Cup

Give Neil Smith credit: He knew when his team was embarrassed. He knew he had to do something before it was too late. So the man who makes the deals, made a deal. He did something.

Thursday, he changed the New York Rangers. Not because he wanted to but because he had to. Big deal. One of the biggest he could have made.

He has Mark Messier, the best player in that uniform in a lifetime, with the red hand sweeping around his biological clock. Better get him some help before it’s too late. If you think you have a chance to win, you have to understand that chance may never come again.

Messier has laughed at the clock. He has this sense of responsibility that only the champions have: If he’s the best player, he owes it to his teammates to enable them to win. And then last spring, just short of his 34th birthday, he mused, “Biologically, I’m 19; chronologically I’m 34. I heard the other day that in hockey terms, I’m 65 for all the games I’ve played.”

It was really kidding on the square. His best years are skatemarks in the ice of time. But he can still impose his will on players around him, and he still has skills beyond the dreams of most mere mortals. Just don’t ask too much of him. Better try to win again now, give up some youth and let the future take care of itself.

“People get intoxicated with youth,” Smith said Thursday night. “Do you want to be young, or do you want to win? It’s no secret we’ve got to win while he’s here. There’s no sense in rebuilding while he’s here.”

Give Messier a shooter in Luc Robitaille to relieve the burden of standing alone. Give Messier a hitter in Ulf Samuelsson to relieve the burden of having to be the toughest guy on the bench. Then Messier is younger both ways -- on offense and defense. The point is not really to give Messier a reward for the best years of his life, but to enable him to make the Rangers win again. Or at least to give it a better shot than last year in the hangover of the champagne party.

In a twinkle of time the joy of the Rangers had turned to embarrassment. The champagne that had filled the Stanley Cup had run out as through a sieve. And the chant of “Nine-teen four-tee” that had dug under their skin for so long was being revised with a devil’s laughter as “Nine-teen ninety-four.” Heh, heh.

There’s nothing quite so embarrassing as the champion falling on his face, and that’s what was happening. What a dizzying time that had been with Messier holding the Stanley Cup over his head and shaking it in triumph and all those fans feeling the earth move with it. Matteau! Matteau! Matteau! Indeed.

Before they knew it, they were a heartbeat away from missing the playoffs in a league in which nearly everybody makes the playoffs. Not in 25 years had the defending champion failed to make the playoffs. And then the Rangers managed to slip in by one point, a margin as thin as a skate blade.

If they had not made it, they would have felt the shame. “Absolutely,” Brian Leetch said when they had escaped.

“Ah, but we don’t have to deal with that now,” Messier said then.

Ah, but they did. They huddled behind the refuge that the strike-gnarled season had not been “a true barometer,” the expression that ran through their inner sanctum. It is was as if they had just played one long exhibition schedule and now they were ready to play the real games. It was as if the fans had been duped into buying a share of a wicker bathtub. How could they get away with those prices?

At that moment Colin Campbell, the coach, moved Petr Nedved’s locker across the room so that he would sit next to Messier, and maybe some of the intensity would rub off on the reluctant young star.

In the playoffs, which they saw as their redeemer, they were exposed as they had been through the season. They were too thin. They couldn’t get a goal when they needed one. They were pushed around by the Flyers. The defending champions were swept, picked clean. The embarrassment was there.

Messier couldn’t bear the load of scoring the goals against the toughest defensive unit and playing defense against the most dangerous offensive unit. That’s a lot to ask of a man his age. The will was there, but there was a lot of won’t coming at him. Trying to carry the load against the Flyers made him look old and slow. He couldn’t impose his will on his own team.

“There was not a lot of spunk left” was the way the coach described it Thursday when the deal was done.

At the same time Smith saw which way the trend was going. The Philadelphia Flyers were too big and too strong for the Rangers. The New Jersey Devils weren’t so big but they were tough. The rules had been changed to reward that toughness. Smith understood. And he felt the urgency, even if he had to shake hands with the devil.

Robitaille is a gunner to shoot on the second line. Then the defense can’t load up for Messier’s line. He’s from the Mike Bossy school; he’s not as good as Bossy, but he’s a five-time All-Star, a 50-goal scorer three times. He demands attention. If he demands attention, then Messier can’t get all the attention.

Samuelsson is the kind of devil hockey people hate and love: hate him if he’s on the other team giving the business to your players; love him if he’s taking the burden off your guys by giving the business to the other team. Samuelsson is perhaps the most hated player in the league. He comes from Pittsburgh, where the great Mario Lemieux has a tender back.

“I know exactly where he has a sore back, so that is exactly where I’ll be going after,” Samuelsson said. He shifted his allegiance quickly enough. The New York media may have railed at his style of play, and may rail again, but the Rangers won’t hate him so much.

“Oh,” Smith said, “I don’t know that he’s that dirty. I know that we hated to play against him.” He’s one of those guys who makes use of hockey’s first rule: There are no rules. There are dirty players all over the league. Mostly, the players accept that -- as in the slashing exchange between Samuelsson and Messier that got both suspended two years ago. “He’s always aggressive, but he doesn’t pick his spots,” Messier said. “He was just doing his job.”

If Samuelsson is doing that job, then Messier doesn’t have to.

If there’s another good year in Messier, then the Rangers can make a better run at giving those people their money’s worth. Maybe Sergei Zubov will be a star for the Pittsburgh Penguins; he didn’t give the Rangers enough. Maybe Nedved will grow to be a star without the benefit of Messier’s aura.

Maybe not. No matter. “You build in hope that someday you get a Stanley Cup team,” Smith said. “We think we have a Stanley Cup team again.” The future is only as long as Messier can sweep around the defense and put the puck in the net. That’s a big deal.