The excitement around Cherneski was probably similar to Chytil. He went to Hartford for a few weeks as the last cut and expected to quickly go back up, but his knee was driven straight into the boards and crushed into little pieces. They showed the X-rays on MSG Network and it was insane, like a badly crumbled egg shell.
In 1998 we also drafted a safe, all-around center at #7, just as we did this summer. The difference is that while the Rangers "settled" for Lias because their favored guys didn't fall to them, Malhotra was the guy they really coveted and looked extremely happy to get.
Savard and Dube were viewed at the time as superior prospects to any prospect we have right now. Dan Cloutier was viewed as a very, very good goalie prospect, an heir apparent to Richter who will make the transition to the future very easy. Cloutier did very well when he got called up as Richter's backup in 1997-98. Copley was viewed similarly to Gropp. The Ferraro twins were viewed as similar to someone like Nieves, legit prospects with limited upside. (A few years earlier, the Ferraro twins were viewed as top prospects, but by 1998 the expectations were much lower.)
First rounder Jeff Brown was seen as a safe prospect. Neil Smith declared that while he won't be an All-Star, he'll definitely be a second pair guy. Next year he claimed that the Rangers think they stole Wes Jarvis in round 2 and he's definitely going to be a quality NHL defenseman. Burke Henry, the third rounder in 1997, had a crazy good season, scoring 83 points in 72 Junior games as a defensively-responsible 18-year-old defenseman. Some Ranger fans were also excited about Tomi Kallarsson based on his play in the Finnish Liiga as an 18-year-old. All these defensemen combined played 39 NHL games, but they were once viewed as really strong prospects.
With hindsight, nobody now will say, "but we had these great first rounders Malhotra, Brown, Cloutier and these amazing over-performing prospects like Dube and Henry!" I assure you plenty of our current prospects and rookies will turn into Malhotra, Brown and Dube.
I hear where you're coming from, but I can't say I totally agree.
For starters, even if we exclude all the recent draft picks and all of them bust, in 1998 we still didn't have an equivalent for Zibanejad, Kreider, Miller, Hayes, Vesey, and Fast. In fact those 1998 Rangers would've loved to have had 24, 26, 24, 25, 24 and 25 year players in those roles. That also doesn't take into account a 1998 equivalent of having 28 year old defensemen in McD and Shattenkirk, or a 23 year old version of Skjei.
My disagreement with the analogy is that it assumes the Rangers hopes completely rely on the unknown and doesn't take into that we have quite a few pieces that are certainly still young enough to be a part of the future. If we were completely relying on Andersson and Chytil, then that would be a different scenario altogether.
If we backtrack and include our current group of prospects, I think there are also several fundamental differences.
I disagree with the assessment that Savard and Dube were viewed more highly than what we have now. And I do that based on two factors, I was working for the Rangers at the time, and I was also writing for HockeysFuture. In 1998, Christian Dube was already struggling to adjust to the AHL, and Marc Savard was a bit of a wildcard because of both his size and his skating - he was not viewed as sure thing, though I was particularly high on him going back to his days in Oshawa. Randy Copley was somewhat viewed similarly to Gropp, though his ranking within that system was much higher than Gropp's is now - which is actually an argument illustrating how the two time periods were different.
Jeff Brown was a bust almost immediately after he was drafted and had actually fallen hard in the 1996 draft after being considered as potential top pick just a few years before. By the time he turned pro in 1998, he was sent to the ECHL, which was not seen nearly in the same light that it is today. Burke Henry hadn't turned pro yet either, so all his success was still in the WHL. Manny Malhotra was just starting the process. In 1998, there was no Chytil turning heads in the AHL as its youngest player either. The Rangers would've killed for that.
Compare that to today, where we already have Skjei who made the jump, Graves who is knocking on the door (something Henry never got close to with the Rangers) and a guy like Pionk is also in the fold. Sean Day might be the closest to a 2017/18 comparable to Jeff Brown, and he's arguably fourth on our list of defenseman under the age of 25, as opposed to Brown possibly being second.
Chytil is doing well against pro competition in the AHL and Andersson is doing the same in Sweden.
The key difference being that these kids are actually responding against pro-level competition, whereas the players your citing hadn't yet turned pro in some cases and were playing against fellow teenagers. That's a pretty sizeable difference. And again, the Rangers long-term outlook isn't solely dependent on what we did at the 2017 draft. We have significantly more talent that could figure into our plans in 2-3 years, and if not, they have more than enough talent and results to land us even younger players who could.
Point being, I just don't see the comparison. The depth wasn't there, there were several guys who were not as far along as some of our guys are, and there wasn't nearly the 28 and under talent on the 1998 roster that there is on this one. If we're going to compare this time period to any, I'd say 2010 is a bit closer. We still had the Callahan, Dubinsky, Staal and Girardi, with guys like Kreider, Del Zotto, McD, and others coming up on the horizon.
