You're embarrassing yourself

First of all, the brief, actually informative portion of today's lesson: we beat the Caps 3-2 last night. We started with the following lines:

Higgins - Prospal - Gaborik
Grachev - Drury - Kotalik
Lisin - Dubinsky - Callahan
Voros - Anisimov - Brashear

Redden - Rozsival
Del Zotto - Girardi
Gilroy - Semenov

Lundqvist
Valiquette

and we switched Prospal and Dubinsky for the third period. The Rangers reportedly played a good game, especially Dubinsky, who apparently made a great move to get the puck out to Higgins for the final and game-winning goal. Gaborik had the other assist on that goal and scored the other two. Some very positive vibes are going around about Higgins (who also assisted on one of Gaborik's two).

Brashear, who got into two fights, was actually cheered a bit at the conclusion of his second one. Which I guess is a positive step? The booing resurfaces as a topic of discussion because Torts made a point post-game to call out the fans for being disrespectful (and, as is his wont, did not pass up the opportunity to somehow blame the media). Michael Obernauer's blog post about the situation is worth a quick read.

Speaking of Tortorella blaming the media for shit, it looks a great deal like Larry Brooks got his feelings hurt again. In today's issue of Brooksie's LiveJournal, rather than writing anything at all about, say, Dubinsky's first game now that his contract holdout has ended, or, like, Brashear being booed again and responding that he'd "find a way to win [our] hearts," Brooks gives us an almost-certainly-out-of-context one-liner from the mouth of the head coach and then wastes an entire article talking about how ridiculous it is.

The gist of the article (which, in an unrepentant move of maturity, includes yet another of Brooks's traditionally flattering images of our head coach) is as follows: Tortorella, in a pre-game interview yesterday, said of his roster of defensemen, "I don't like having extra bodies around. If it were up to me alone, I'd prefer six." That is an insane thing to do professionally, in the current incarnation of the NHL, so therefore John Tortorella is a bad crazy person.

This tirade of Brooks's would be a completely reasonable rant, if the coach had actually seriously suggested that we might be dropping down to only carry 6 defensemen on our 23-person NHL roster. As Brooks rightly suggests, that is a megafoolish, ridiculous-pants idea. We get 3 spare slots on a roster, and filling them all with forwards is asking for trouble of the "what if a defenseman gets injured or just decides to suck?" variety (see also: the entirely unaccountable Rangers defense last season (which, actually, would have been an interesting parallel to draw, had Brooks been in the business of drawing interesting parallels and not crying into his cereal about the mean Tortorella-man)).

But, um, Larry, you see, the thing is, that's not actually happening. It hasn't even really been suggested. The Rangers roster, right now, at training camp, is at 23. 14 forwards, 7 defensemen, and 2 goalies, as is pretty standard. The thing about John Tortorella is that he tends to be a little...I dunno...strongheaded?...about the way he runs his team. If he actually had any plans to ever seriously cut the Rangers roster to 6 defensemen with 15 forwards, wouldn't he do more than, like, make the comment "if it were up to me, we'd only have 6" in some bullshit pre-game interview and then move on? Of course he hasn't moved forward with that idea: it's not tenable. And until I hear actual evidence otherwise, I'm gonna stick with the overwhelmingly likely theory that this was taken a little out of context, and that there's no way any modern NHL coach (even if he is the Boogeyman, Larry) would every actually attempt to handicap a roster like that.

Interesting corollary to that theory: there is no good goddamn reason to write a whole article about this. Yes, it's a layup to decide to include Del Zotto on the roster, at least for the first nine games (which don't count against his contract). That's why we're doing it! There's nothing to actually complain about here, Brooksie. Simmer.

That's all I got. If real news breaks that Tortorella actually wants to take our roster down to 6 defensemen, for real, then I apologize, I regret everything I wrote here today (except the first bit, about last night's game and Brashear), and Brooks was right to uncover this problem early. Doesn't seem likely, though, does it?