Everyone else is count ing the numbers, counting the number of returning reinforcements, counting the number of days until the Rangers’ coach might make the Rangers’ captain a healthy scratch.
Not, however, Chris Drury, the aforementioned captain. Not, however, John Tortorella, the aforementioned coach.
Regardless of the appearance of inevitability to it all, if and when it does happen, it will be a seismic shock to the system, for we’re talking about Chris Drury, who was named to last year’s U.S. Olympic team because of who he is.
We’re talking about Drury, on the fourth year of a five-year contract under which he earns $7.05 million per season, who was signed as a first- or second-line center on July 1, 2007. But now he is a fourth-line right wing who primarily kills penalties and takes defensive zone faceoffs, responsibilities he has performed well.
We’re talking about Drury, who missed all but a little more than one period of the first 32 games with a twice broken finger, and who has yet to register a goal (four assists) in 22 games.
We’re talking about Big Moment Chris perhaps becoming a healthy scratch.
We are, and you are if e-mail and Twitter messages are an indication. But Drury sure isn’t and Tortorella sure isn’t, even as Vinny Prospal makes his season debut tonight when the increasingly representative but still barely relevant Devils come to the Garden, thus knocking a forward out of the lineup whom the coach declined to identify.
“I’m doing everything I can to get ready for the next game, just like I always do, nothing changes because of who’s in or who’s out or what might happen,” Drury told The Post following practice.
“As I said before, whatever the coach asks of me, I try to do the best I can whenever I’m out there,” he said. “And I try to be the most positive influence I can be in the room, on the bench, on the ice. I don’t worry about ‘What-ifs.’
“And I don’t answer hypothetical questions.”
Tortorella, who turned down a request to speak to the topic, has called on Drury to take 47 of the club’s 134 defensive zone faceoffs over the last eight games. The captain most often has come off the bench to win 68.1 percent of those draws (32 of 47), and the rest of the club has won 54 percent (47 of 87) in that stretch.
It’s an assignment the coach obviously regards with importance. The question is — the hypothetical question that no one wishes to answer, and why would anyone? — whether that carries enough weight to keep Drury in uniform with Prospal back and with Erik Christensen no more than a week away from being healthy enough to rejoin the lineup.
Ruslan Fedotenko is going to be another month or so after undergoing an emergency appendectomy yesterday, so that’s one fewer option for the coach, who hasn’t had an entirely healthy squad for one game.
But coaching is about options and so Tortorella yesterday refuted the notion that the walking wounded making their way back — Ryan Callahan and Brandon Dubinsky returned on Tuesday — could somehow be twisted into a negative.
“There are decisions the staff and organization have to make every day, whether [players] are healthy or hurt,” he said. “It’s all part of it.”
But whoever thought that scratching Chris Drury could become part of it, too?
No one, that’s who.