Right now? A fairer comparison would be to judge the 3 given the exact set of circumstances:
NYI/Snow: Tavares, Okposo & Clutterbuck get homesick and/or leave the team for much more money
NYR/Sather: Lundqvist, McDonagh & Stepan get homesick and /or leave the team much more money
That's fair.
You can tweak the third players listed above, but that would put Snow & Sather on a level & situation to where Lou is right now, in losing Parise, Kovalchuk & Clarkson, who wanted to go home, not to mention winning a huge amount of $$$ payday in doing so.
Then you can watch the NYR & NYI try to scrape up talent out of nowhere and try to sign anyone available in a feeble attempt to replace the gaping holes created by the departure of 3 key players, some of which in the NJD scenario, were impressive first-liners with HHOF talent, skill, leadership qualities, or overachievers with some grit and who can sometimes fight as well. Oh, and some goals scored among them all too.
Then IMHO, you can more carefully and accurately judge Snow, Sather & Lamoriello as contemporaries.
Snow would have to win a Championship to be put on the same level of Lamoriello.
And for the people who say “the game has passed Lou by†clearly don't realize that the 2012 team that got to within 60 minutes of forcing a Game 7 of the 2012 SCF was built in the post 2004-2005 lockout NHL, an era where Lou was supposed to fail in, where he rebuilt on the fly and assembled a high-quality, Championship-caliber team with many key players acquired in this same era. I never understood that criticism of Lou.
This was smack dab in the middle of an era where the NJD drafted no higher than #20 in a period of 15 out of 17 years. The only reason it wasn't 16 out of 17 years was because Lou won a Scott Stevens/St. Louis Blues tampering case from 1994 and had a 5 year window to swap first round draft picks with them, which he exercised the right to do so in 2003, where they should have picked at #30 due to winning the SC, and then swapped and moved up to select Parise at #17
And they drafted a perfectly capable Travis Zajac & Adam Henrique, who although not superstars, have proven themselves to be first line players when given the right linemates. Not to mention their best defenseman Andy Greene was an undrafted gem of a find.
NJD fans say that he has rebuilt the defense as well. Not to mention, found a very capable replacement to Brodeur and a backup in Kinkaid that is lately giving Schneider a run for his money. Might be a new goalie controversy in NJ folks. Stay tuned.
As for Slats, other than 1 or 2 NYR fans who fairly voiced there displeasure with him and the one who posted revisionist history regarding him, he is a clearly a distant third.
For Icanada who said “Sather was the GM/coach and architect behind the oilers of the 80s..â€, you are totally mistaken or clearly don't remember what happened. It's public knowledge that he had nothing to do with Gretzky and Coffey. That was all on their owner, Peter Pocklington, who wanted to stick it to the NHL and acquire the prized Gretzky, as the Oilers were in the competing WHL and yet to be absorbed by the NHL. And he was still coach and not yet GM when Messier was drafted as well. He might be a good head coach, but to call him an “architect†of that dynasty era is a misnomer.
If Sather is better than Snow or Lamoriello, why did he wait so long to draft Lundqvist in the later rounds, risking another team selecting him, and then proceeded to use 2 Top 10 draft picks on goalies Dan Blackburn #10 and Al Montoya #6?
For the most part, the NYR are a team that is still primarily a team of free agents, anchored by an exceptional HHOF goalie and anchored by a defense that is led by a player they didn't even draft and are extremely luck to have lol.
So for the most part, I'm not sure how some of you can have Sather ahead of Snow & Lamoriello.