Continuing in a remarkably bad offseason the Rangers walked away from a 24 year old 60 point player over a few hundred thousand dollars. I simply can no fathom how this team will now be better than the one the finished last season. Clearly it should be better than the one that started last season, but the one that finished was, in my personal opinion, significantly better than this group now.
The only way I can rationalize this as being a good move, is if they couldn’t find any takers for him and they are still serious about acquiring Dany Heatley, otherwise this is about as piss-poor asset management as I have seen in the NHL in a long while. How many times do you have 100% control over where a young scoring winger plays and you walk away from that? Especially because of a 20/20 player like Kotalik whose signing truly defies all logic.