Rangers trade for mediocre veteran goalie: With Mike Richter gone for the season, the NY Rangers traded forward Rem Murray, defenseman Tomas Kloucek and the rights to defenseman Marek Zidlicky to Nashvile for goalie Mike Dunham.

So the Rangers will replace one injury riddled veteran with... another veteran, nowhere near as talented, who also gets injured all the time. Hooray!

LCS' analysis comes down pretty hard on the Rangers:

Richter isn't the only injured Ranger. Pavel Bure could be done for the year. Brian Leetch is out for what looks like an extended period of time. And Eric Lindros is always one hit away from an extended vacation at Sunshine Acres.

Since the Rangers are already thin throughout the organization (and have just traded away three more players while getting one in return), they made another trade Thursday night, acquiring forward Josh Green from Edmonton for a conditional pick in the 2004 draft.

Yay.

But pulls no punches with the Predators either:

Predators GM David Poile couldn't have made a worse trade if he's shipped his one tradable player for a bucket of used pucks and a moth-eaten Rangers jersey. ... these players may turn out to be greatness eventually. But this team doesn't have eventualities. They need results. Now. Only Murray is positioned to deliver on that. And in their current state, it will take a great deal more than a single player to make a difference on this team.

Plainly put in a cliché: Poile had one shot and he blew it.

With all those quizes, it had to happen sooner of later:




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Marketing the NHL: LCS has some important ideas on marketing hockey and the NHL, following in the footsteps of the National Basketball Association's rise to power in the nineties. My favorite one is this:

Fair or not, some biases are currently working against hockey players. Even now, in the 21st century, the public's image of a hockey player is a large, oafish Neanderthal with a stick who has five teeth in his head and cannot string as many words together in a sentence. Granted, many hockey players are missing some teeth, but most put in fake teeth when they aren't playing. And besides, anyone who claims that hockey players are eyesores and uncharismatic clearly have not seen the wives and girlfriends that hockey players snag: Janet Jones, Carol Alt, Pamela Anderson, Anna Kournikova, that older sister from Full House now that she's all grown up and stuff. The list goes on and on. If hot, leggy supermodels find hockey players and LCS Hockey correspondent attractive, then there has to be something marketable there that Madison Avenue can exploit. At this point, the only way to refute old stereotypes is for the viewing public to actually see hockey players acting in commercials. Unlike Gary Thorne at the beach, the more exposure these players can get, the better.

Flyers-Sharks swap d-men: The San Jose Sharks traded defenseman Marcus Ragnarsson to the Philadelphia Flyers on Friday for defenseman Dan McGillis.