41 games down, 41 games to go. So everyone issues report cards or something? Andrew Gross has graded each individual player, which is fun, and more often than not he's right. My father took a more general approach, grading the club in various subjects, such as Offense, Defense, Goaltending, PP, PK, Intangibles, and Management (F, F, B/B+, F, A, D-, and D, respectively). The point is, we're halfway through, so it's time to take stock and talk about who and where we are as a club, going into the second half of the season, which starts tonight when the Bruins visit the Garden at 7. Rather than grades, let's assume I just work for one of those hippie schools that gives everyone like a rabbit sticker and a paragraph or something, and stick with descriptions and not ratings.
Before we get into that, two quick personnel notes: Matt Zaba backed up Lundqvist on Saturday afternoon, and should again tonight. Theoretically, this is to give Chad Dosnueve a chance to get some actual games in for the Wolfpack, so he can come back to the Rangers and actually start a game and give Lundqvist a rest, sometime in this 18-games-in-33-nights stretch that started 5 nights ago (Sunday was already Lundqvist's 15th straight start, and oh hey he's playing in those there Olympic thingers too). But hey - we don't need to find a competent backup. Hank can handle it. Don't worry about a thing.
Also, Aaron Voros played both games of the home-and-home, finally rightfully replacing Donald Brashear for a while. After being granted the favor of 6:13 of ice time total, through the two games combined, he'll be sat again in favor of Brashear tonight. Voros plus Brashear still equals $2.4 million a year, for the record.
Anyway, midterms. In goal, it's hard to complain about our starter. Lundqvist's critics would point out that he has let in some soft goals this half-season. While they wouldn't be wrong, he's also made some impossible saves (yes, impossible), if we're going to judge by outliers. More pertinently, Lundqvist is consistent. Every night, he gives the Rangers a chance, and moreover, almost every win is because of him. The Rangers are at 2.78 goals against per game, and we've only allowed more than two goals in regulation 3 times since the Thanksgiving home-and-home against the Penguins. For a guy who gets no support at all half the time he plays, that's kingly. If we're grading on a curve, Hank is throwing it off.
At backup, we're woeful. Valiquette had some bad performances early, and unfortunately, when you're the veteran backup goalie, you don't get the chance to make early mistakes like he did. We loved Stephen Valiquette for his locker room presence, but he didn't perform as well as he needed to as a backup. So, we sent him to Hartford. Unfortunately, that was over a month ago, and we seem to have forgotten to find a replacement. So, we've been cycling through backups from Hartford who never start. There are backup goalies in this league for a reason, and we can't realistically expect Lundqvist to keep starting every game like this and have any juice left in him after the Olympics, when we're theoretically scrambling to make the playoffs. Bad news. It's hard to justify sitting The King when he keeps being the only reason we have a chance to win games, but we need to find someone, and we need to play Valiquette or Johnson or Zaba once in a while until we do.
We have defensemen. I can confidently say that there are people who play the position of defenseman on the New York Rangers. So, that's one in the positives column.
In seriousness, the "kids" have taken strides this season. Matt Gilroy's stay in Hartford did him some good, and he's been playing more solidly, but he's still capable of way more than he's giving. I think if we keep training him, both in New York and in Hartford, in a year or two, we'll be loving him. I'm keeping the faith in his high ceiling. Michael Del Zotto is getting better and better. In addition to his offensive ability, he's added a strong physical component to his game over the last month or so, and that's been great news. With a little more defensive training, and a little less "Gaborik is on the ice so I have to pass to him no matter what", he'll be fantastic.
Staal has not been the standout defenseman he was last season. Early on, he looked mediocre, but that might be due to attempting to play too much offense. Since he's settled back into a more defensive role, he's looked good again. I'd be happier if he looked spectacular, but I expect that to come in time. Meanwhile, Girardi has had the month of his life. He's played the best defense I've ever seen him play. If he can be consistent at this level, and Staal can work his way back up, they have the potential to be the two very solid blue liners who skate next to the potential offensive threats of Gilroy and DZ. A boy can dream.
The Albatross Twins, at season's midpoint, still seem to be entrenched in a competition to see who can suck more. At the beginning of the season, Redden wore the crown*, coming off of last season, when Rozsival actually joined the play once in a while and didn't directly lead to quite so many goals. But Rozsie stole it early, when Redden became a nonfactor by being taken away from his offensive responsibilities, and Rozsival singlehandedly led to so very, very many odd-man rushes against. This lasted for a couple of months, through which Redden's defensive play steadily declined until he finally took it, playing so badly that even Tortorella benched him. He helped his case by throwing a tantrum (which no doubt consumed more energy than he's used on the ice in years) in Torts's office, then shrugging off to the media the very notion that he might have more to give. He wears the crown still, but he's played slightly more solidly since his benching, and if Rozsival stops shooting the puck again, he has a chance to take it back before too long. At least one of these two men needs to be traded before we are legitimate.
In their brief time with the club, Ilkka Heikkinen and Bobby Sanguinetti each did a few good things. I would like to see a roster that carries seven defensemen (we currently have the roster room, but not the cap room, to add someone), and I would like to see more rotation. That said, Torts does seem willing to try these guys out when he can. We can't afford a seventh on the roster, and we can't send any of the defensemen we'd want to rotate down to Hartford without running the risk of someone picking him up on waivers (in which case we'd be saddled with half his salary throughout his remaining contract). When Gilroy and Redden were out, he did bring up these guys, and they brought something to the table. Sanguinetti hits people, and Heikkinen has a little stick skill. I'd like to see more of them, if possible.
Brandon Dubinsky has not lived up to the contract headache he put us through in September. In the off-season, Dubinsky and Sather agreed that the former was an important part of the latter's club's success and a relevant NHL first-line center. Dubi's play, though often solid, has been far less consistent in sending that message. I expect Dubinsky's ceiling is somewhat higher than we've seen, but he needs to be more consistently physical. Some games, he's skating hard, in people's faces, winning puck battles, and other games, he's just not.
Chris Drury gets a bad rap. You've seen me say it before, and I'll probably say it again. He's not a great choice for team captain, but he's a solid hockey player, he's an amazing penalty killer, and the less burden is on him, the more cool stuff he does. He's still not being used right (he could be one of the best third-line centers in hockey, if only we'd commit to that idea), but he's being used better than he was under Renney. Remember when he made him a third-liner, and all of a sudden he scored 3 goals in 4 games? We rewarded him by making him not a third-liner anymore. That's stupid. Do what works.
Artem Anisimov is becoming a lot of fun to watch. He's young and has a lot to learn about making smart decisions, but he can do a lot of nifty things with his stick, and that's cool. Erik Christensen is either a fourth-line center or a first, I guess? Honestly, he seems like a good man to have around, and I'd be happy to try him out as a third-line center, if we didn't have three better centers. He can make the right play often enough, and I'm excited to see more of him. It's good to have a few Erik Christensens around, as long as you don't have too many. Brian Boyle is my ideal fourth line center (no disrespect to Blair Betts, whom I also loved at the position). He's big and unafraid to use his body, and he can move the puck well enough. He's the perfect fourth-liner, to me. Too bad our fourth line never sees the ice.
I don't have to say much about Marian Gaborik, do I? On a team that is 24th in the league in goals scored, 7 goals ahead of dead last, he leads the league in scoring, with over a quarter of the Rangers' total goals. He probably gets the Henrik Lundqvist "throwing off the curve" award: mathematically speaking, we just can't win games without him. Note that this is not a good thing. But it speaks well of him. Goddamn it he's so fast.
Vinny Prospal is my favorite surprise of the season so far. We signed him, you'll recall, for $1.1 million dollars for one season, as insurance in case we didn't get Dubi locked up, at age 34. I believe I called him "past his prime" or something, on signing him. Do that math, people. $100,000 more than Aaron Voros. $300,000 less than Donald Brashear. Less than half of Christopher Higgins. $100,000 more than a third of Ales Kotalik. Less than 17% of Wade Redden. Get it? He's a big damn hero, and we miss him incredibly while he's out for this stretch. He's fast, he's loud, he hits, he's got great skill, and he's smart: he knows where to put the puck and where to put his body, and he's good enough to get them there. Prospal for President, etc.
Speaking of very smart, physical Alternate Captains, Ryan Callahan. Is. A very smart, physical Alternate Captain. That's what he is. What I'm saying is: everything I said about Prospal, only ten years younger, slightly less loud, and an Olympian. Callahan for VP. Or, maybe Callahan for President and Prospal for VP?
Christopher Higgins and Sean Avery are our team enigmas. I just don't get them. Higgins's lack of scoring makes no sense. A recreational baseball statistician once taught me about looking at a player's seasonal batting average compared to their walks and hit-by-pitches in order to determine whether his batting average is lower, higher, or on par with where it "should be," and therefore where it will probably even out to. I would like to say that Higgins's numbers are way lower than they "should be," and that he will eventually "even up" to higher end-of-season totals. But I'm not sure that's how it works. Higgins does absolutely everything right except finish. He's usually in the right place, making the right hit or the right pass, getting himself in good position with the puck, making things happen. But he can't hit the broad side of a barn, as they say in a tired old expression to show that he has an inaccurate shot. I want to love Higgins for everything he does and assume that the scoring will come, so for now I'm going to do that. But I've been doing that for...let's see...right around 41 games so far.
Avery, on the other hand, is The Enigma The League Built. Deciding "The New NHL" needed a villain story, but not wanting to popularize any of the actual dirty, injury-inducing goons of the league, the NHL made Sean Avery public enemy #1, even going so far as to authorize, before un-authorizing, an "Avery Rule" T-shirt (after writing the new NHL rule that says you're not allowed to make fun of Marty Brodeur 'cause he'll cry, or whatever). When Avery made it back from his indefinite suspension (yes, in the NHL, intentionally cracking a guy's skull open gets you 2 games, and using the term "sloppy seconds" in an interview gets you an indefinite suspension), he was a "changed man." Which is to say: a less effective man. Larry Brooks's article today hits the situation perfectly: Avery needs to be able to play on the edge in order to be effective. When effective, Avery is a total game-changer. If he plays on the edge, he's going to get penalized unfairly sometimes. That needs to be okay. As Brooks says, Avery needs to know that he has Torts's support in that situation, and it's not clear that he does. Put another way, also by Brooksie, "If you can't be a little bit pregnant, you can't be a little bit Sean Avery either."
If Prospal is the most pleasant surprise of the half-season, Ales Kotalik is the least pleasant. For $3 million a year for 3 years, we brought him in to be a sniper on the wing and on the power play point. You'll recall my excitement. What we got was 6 goals in 38 games played and a man who doesn't even appear on the top power play unit anymore. It's clear, now that we've seen him play half a season, that Kotalik has no idea (none, whatsoever) what to do with the puck when he's not shooting it. That's very disappointing. But he still shoots fast. It would be nice to see him hit the net a little more. Or, a lot more?
Enver Lisin got a whole lot of chances to prove himself on top lines in the beginning of the season. Torts saw something we didn't, I guess. Lisin proved nothing. Now he's on the fourth line, which Torts seems to think means "line containing your tenth, eleventh, and twelfth best fowards," not "checking line." That's a mentality I don't get. Speaking of mentalities I don't get, Donald Brashear is still $1.4 million of bullshit. Sure, he hasn't done anything dirty to anyone else, so I guess I'm not embarrassed in that sense, but he hasn't done anything at all! He's a washed-up goon, so now he's a total nonfactor. Well, except for the cap hit and roster space. Meanwhile, Aaron Voros, who, like, Boyle, is another ideal fourth-liner for me (big, uses his body, can use his stick to make plays sometimes, too), never sees the ice! As mentioned above, Voros finally played two, his first since November, and is now again scratched in favor of Brashear. I don't get that. I'd like to give Voros a good rating, but he doesn't play enough. Why, Torts?
Of the prospects that have spent time in New York, PA Parenteau is the only one who was up long enough to make an impression. It was largely positive, and, like Christensen, I'd like to see him, in time, rotate in and get more of a chance to prove himself.
On the coaching staff, I generally like the way John Tortorella speaks about things; he's very candid, which is rare and great. As for his personnel decisions: well, you've seen what I think. He generally has a good idea of what to do with kids and what the right kind of player is. Naming Callahan and Prospal Alternates was exactly the right way to go. But I hate how he uses (doesn't use) a fourth line, and I don't understand his affinity for a Brashear over a Voros. Other than that, there's only so much he can do with the hand he's been dealt. Dealt by a Glen Sather who seems more guided by randomness than by decisions. For every Vinny Prospal, there's a Donald Brashear; for every trading Scott Gomez, there's a signing Wade Redden; for every letting Nik Zherdev go, there's a letting Paul Mara go. Sather seems to have no idea what a team needs. Messier for GM. Mike Sullivan is Torts, Junior, and that's perfect. I like hearing him talk about the team almost as much as I like hearing Tortorella himself do so. Also, no complaints about Benoit Allaire: how could there be? The things he did for the Phoenix Coyotes, specifically Nikolai Khabibulin, spoke for themselves, and I think Lundqvist speaks pretty well for him now.
In general, hold on, Ranger fans. Things aren't gonna get a lot better in the short term, but we seem a lot less likely, as a team, to sit around while things are shitty and let them stay shitty than we were a season ago. Things might not change as quickly as we'd like, but they will change. There are seeds of good things here. Let's Go Rangers!
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