Glen Sather -- Is the tide turning?

If there is one thing all New York Rangers fans love to hate, it's Glen Sather.  And he has earned it.  Let's make a list of some of his abysmal decisions (in case you think they were just the product of feverish nightmares):

1. And this should ALWAYS be number one because it is the most epic fail of all trades, ever.  The Oilers, of which Sather was GM at the time, traded FIRST Adam Graves AND THEN Mark Messier to the Rangers in 1991.  It sounds like a joke, but it isn't.  Sure -- worked out amazingly for the Rangers.  The problem?  Now Sather is ours.  And before that, in 1988 he traded Wayne Gretzky to the Kings.  One of the reasons for all these trades is likely Sather's piss-poor drafting in the 1980s.  Suddenly the Oilers found themselves full of old guys, and the talented players wanted none of it.  Sound familiar?  Good; let's move on.

2. In 2000, Sather joined the Rangers as GM.  Why did the Rangers organization permit this travesty?  Drugs, maybe.  In the first four years of his joining, the Rangers didn't make the playoffs once.  He hired a coach (Bryan Trottier) who had never been head coach of anything before.  That worked out exactly as well as you'd expect.

3. He signed Scott Gomez for a seven year contract at $7 mil per year.  Compare that to Cally and Duby's recent signings of just above $4 mil/year for 3/4 years (respectively).  And then when Sather traded him away to Montreal, who did he get in exchange?  Chris Higgins.  Yeah.  (As a side note, thank-fucking-God Higgins did not get his name on a Cup.)

4. He resigned Rozsival in 2008 to a $24 mil, four year contract.  No one is sure to this day what he was smoking.

5. Chris Drury.  That's it; I don't need to explain.  You know.  His contract: $35 million over five years.

6. Wade Redden.  Six years, $39 million.

I think you get the picture.  But amidst all of this stupidity, Sather seemed to learn, at least, how to draft.  Lundqvist, Callahan, Dubinsky, Staal, just to name a few -- all his choices.  Kreider is a future possible addition to this list.

Then it started to get crazy, as though Sather was suddenly seized by the enormity of his screw-ups.  Wade Redden was placed on waivers at the beginning of the 2010-2011 season.  And then, January of this year, Sather did something unthinkable: He got another team to trade us someone for Rozsival.  Wolski may not be anywhere near a Dubinsky, but Rangers fans were mostly in agreement that we got the better end of that trade.  And then, during the 2011 offseason, Sather bought out Chris Drury, and acquired Brad Richards.

Who knows what 2011-2012 will bring?  But maybe the tide is turning for Sather.  Or, maybe this is a cruel trick that is meant to build our hopes just to crush us yet again.  Which will it be, Sather?