Joe's Reaction of the Week (Eric's Version): Just Play The Kids

Joe is on sabbatical from Joe's Reaction of the Week until November. Until then, other Blueshirt Banter's writers will be filling in for him. Today, it's Eric Kohn.

In an earlier version of this column (Chip's version), our friend Chip argued that there's no such thing as a bad professional tryout (PTO):

In the Chris Drury Era (2021 forward), the Rangers have signed the following players to PTOs:

Matt Bartkowski, Jimmy Vesey, Adam Clendening, Blake Hillman, Adam Erne, Madison Bowey, Conor Sheary, Andrej Sustr.

Vesey and Sheary are the only two who were signed to contracts and both played well for the Rangers. Hillman and Clendening both played a little bit with Hartford, the rest were never heard from again. ...

So, while PTO's are not necessarily a big deal, there are opportunities for them to help augment the team, and sometimes—as was the case with Vesey—a player who is brought in on a PTO can actually become an impactful player for the team. As we get closer to September and the start of camp, there are a few players still on the free agent market who could make sense for the Rangers on a PTO and who could stand to win a spot.

I'm generally in agreement with Chip here. The two cases where the New York Rangers signed a player to a PTO and then went on to sign him to a contract were between fine and acceptable, but they were also both kind of special cases. Vesey was a known quantity to the Rangers, having started his career with the team. And Sheary was, well, he was head coach Mike Sullivan's safety blanket. Plenty of pixels were spilled last year about Sheary, but in the end he played well enough on a team that was bad. Not the kind of thing that's worth getting that exercised about.

So, too, is it with the latest PTO-turned-NHL-contract the Rangers signed, this time with Luke Glendening.

Glendening (who hails from right here where I am in Grand Rapids, Mich.) is entering his 14th season of NHL hockey. With Joe Veleno out for the foreseeable future, and with Justin Dowling just clearly not being an NHL-quality hockey player, Glendening will be centering the Rangers' fourth line until Veleno is ready to return—and depending on how he plays, possibly even after that.

This, again, is nothing really worth getting all that annoyed about. Glendening is a fourth-line kind of guy, and he's far from totally useless in that kind of a role:

All that's fine enough. But I'd still like to ask the question: why?