Samuelsson is not 1st pairing. 2nd pairing, yeah. Mid 90s man. 1st pairing calibre was Leetch, Chelios, McInnis, Coffey, Suter, Bourque, Housley, Lidstrom, Zubov, Larry Murphy, Teppo, Stevens, Hatcher, Gonchar. We traded a legit 1st pairing power play specialist (and how long have we been chasing that horse in the last 2 decades?) for a slow but tough as nails defenseman who would last us all of 4 seasons and 2 year stint with an underproductive Robitaille. Again, flawed logic. There's a bear attacking us. Let's use one of the support beams in the cabin as a bludgeoning weapon - type of flawed logic.
People are forgetting the context of the times and the impact that the Flyers, and in particular Eric Lindros and the Legion of Doom, had not only on the Rangers but the entire league.
If there were two trends that typified the mid-90s, it was size and the trap. All of a sudden everyone was trying to get bigger, stronger, and tougher. That trend lasted until 04-05 lockout after which their was the crackdown on obstruction that has allowed players like Zucc to thrive. When teams set out to draft players it seemed like they often valued size over skill. There are few players in the history of the league who had the impact that Lindros had. Before his concussions sidetracked his career, he was an incredible hockey player. At the time, there weren't many players of his size and few had the combination of size, skating ability, strength, hands, and toughness that he had.
So it wasn't just the Rangers: it was everybody.
Now Ulfie wasn't really that big but he had a reputation as a tough, dirty, take-no-prisoners defenseman, particularly in the crease in front of his own goalie: the perfect antidote to Lindros. It's not a question of him being 1st, 2nd, or 3rd pair (and people made much less of those terms then but talked more of TOI), it was a question of how he would be deployed.
It's always and interesting question of how teams around the league react to the previous year's Cup winner: particularly if that team uses a particular strategy or style. While the Flyers never won the Cup during that era, the Devs with their emphasis on the other trend (the trap) that was the dominant team, Lindros and the Flyers influenced the Rangers and the league in a myriad of ways.
Like Tawnos and others I didn't like the trade but I certainly understood it.