When less than 11,000 people show up at The Coliseum for a Rangers-Islanders game, we didn’t think there was a hole on Long Island deeper than the one in which Charles Wang is burying his NHL franchise.
But after giving up a bad rebound, making an even worse attempt at a pokecheck, and giving up a 45-footer to turn a 2-0 lead into a 3-2 deficit against an American Hockey League lineup, Rangers goalie Marty Biron probably wanted to tunnel all the way to a Chilean coal mine.
We mean, we dig the fact that Wang, claiming losses of $20 million a year while waiting for his Lighthouse project windfall, has decided to leave his team $16.7 million, the equivalent of four good NHL players, below the salary cap. Without the injured Kyle Okposo and Mark Streit, the Islanders took the ice last night with what for our money — well, actually Wang’s money — is the worst lineup for a non-expansion team since the Penguins and Devils vied for Mario Lemieux in the early ’80s.
So, having already lost a game in Uniondale in the season’s first week, John Tortorella, damn the home-and-home continuing tonight at The Garden, decided he wasn’t about to lose another one. He pulled Biron after goal three for Henrik Lundqvist.
Brandon Prust’s tip-in 51 seconds later, followed by two goals by Marian Gaborik did not restore order, it turned out. But Gaborik’s hat trick score just 25 seconds after the Islanders fought back for a second tie did, and the Rangers got out of The Place That Time Forgot with a 6-5 victory last night at the Coliseum.
“We did some great things and we did some horrible things,” Tortorella said.
And the Rangers, coming off a solid November, have an opportunity to make the next five months the best of their times in more than a decade, while the worst of times in Uniondale continue unabated.
Hard as the Islanders, one game removed from a 14-game winless streak that made Scott Gordon the first coaching casualty to the NHL season, worked last night, it doesn’t get much more depressing than this. Not for the fans flashing an SOS to all the ships at sea for Wang’s Lighthouse, nor for the hockey market as whole, what with the Devils struggling, too.
Perhaps more Rangers fans — they still were 50 percent of the house — didn’t fully realize just how many good seats that still were available because they didn’t show up either, despite the truth that their team is now clearly and finally the cock of the New York walk.
Exactly six times since 1972-73, the birth season of the Islanders, have the Rangers finished a regular season as the best NHL team in the region. They did it during the Islanders’ first three years, and three out of four seasons between 1990-91 through 1993-94, and were also the last local team standing in the playoffs two other springs, 1979 and 2008.
But considering the years of opportunity — and before the institution of the salary cap, the resources of Madison Square Garden — this is ever more damning evidence against a franchise that has now won one Stanley Cup in 70 seasons.
Nevertheless, it’s been full-speed ahead this season for an 85th anniversary celebration. Exceptions being made by an unconscionable refusal to honor the most successful decade in the team’s history — its first — by not retiring the numbers of Bill Cook and Frank Boucher, two Hall of Famers who keyed two of the franchise’s four Cups.
Undoubtedly this ridiculously overdue honoring of two pioneers has yet to happen because Boucher and Cook can’t be brought back to life for a sweater-raising extravaganza. Admittedly, though, this is much more an issue with us than with the current fans, who of course, would rather see Lundqvist up there someday.
After surrendering two goals on a good deflection and a lucky one, Lundqvist stopped a semi-breakaway by Michael Grabner seconds after Gaborik’s game winner and cleaned up the mess, if barely. The Rangers moved to 31 points, a solid eight ahead of the ninth-place Hurricanes, and, as a delicious bonus for the taunted and the haunted, 13 points ahead of the clearly-not-what-they-used-to-be Devils and 18 ahead of the Islanders.
The Rangers last night showed off the most reliable goal scorer in the region in Gaborik and were rescued by its best goalie, Lundqvist, more reason to brag.
Life will remain hard for a team that doesn’t have enough firepower to move into the top playoff tier in the conference. But in comparison to Rangers’ two closest rivals, life finally is good.