After my friendly review of Rick Nash’s performances, I don’t think it would be right to completely leave out Eric Staal, who I let by with a very brief mention. I did mention the important part: Eric Staal is technically more worthless than Rick Nash.

Now, I was going to wait for a while to see if E-stall was going to start getting upgraded minutes, so we could get a good look at him trying to make a last gasp at marketability. But the Rangers ended up getting slaughtered today, and it doesn’t look like Staal plans to contribute in this series.

Those are Eric Staal’s numbers in the playoff series against PIT going into today’s game. How is this possible? We’re talking about a guy who is getting over $8 million this season (a bit over 4 of it from NYR). Wow, but E-stall is not living up to ANY pay at all.

We were destroyed by PIT today, 0-5, in what may have been the most pathetic playoff game I have ever watched. E-stall was nowhere to be seen. He ended up with a -1 rating, but he at least took 66% of his faceoffs. I just can’t understand why we gave up two 2nd round draft picks and a prospect for this. Really? Another Captain jumping off his bandwagon, this time from Carolina.

It doesn’t feel as bad in the case of Staal because he will be gone as a free agent after this season, while we will be stuck with Nash for another year. However, there is some hope we could trade Nash to some suckers, since his no-trade clause is limited.

It’s sad that we gave up so much of the future because we thought E-stall was going to make some miracle happen at this point in his career- just from getting a change of scenery. But that is what we did, so now we pay the price.

But did Eric Staal really have to be this bad?