from Larry Brooks of the New York Post,

The work necessary to maintain the Rangers’ five-year run as an upper-echelon team will continue following this NHL Entry Draft weekend, over which general manager Jeff Gorton was unable to get much accomplished.

“I think we have things to do to get us where we want to go,” Gorton said Saturday. “We’re in a spot where we’re trying to get better, trying to make deals to get better. We’ve been in a lot of [trade] conversations. We’re listening to everything and we’ll see where it goes. We tried to do some things, and I’d say we came close to doing something to get into the first round, but it didn’t work out and we weren’t going to be forced into doing something just to do it.”

Better safe than sorry for the Blueshirts, no doubt about that. There is time to renovate before the free-agent market opens July 1, there is time to renovate before camp opens in mid-September, and there is time to renovate before next season’s trade deadline. A year ago at this time, the Penguins weren’t anyone’s idea of a contender, much less a Stanley Cup champion.

But if there were no acceptable deals to be had this weekend, the process of remodeling a roster filled with expensive (some would say, onerous) contracts isn’t necessarily going to get any easier for Gorton, who has been steadfast in not offering assets such as Rick Nash and Derek Stepan at a discount.

continued