So now John Tortorella has made it clear he wants the title of Ranger team captain as well as the ones of head coach and travel director he already owns.
He has made it clear that he not only wants to control what the players do on and off the ice, but also wants to correct what they think.
He tells the players to claim ownership of the locker room, but then simply repossesses it when he dislikes something one of the athletes says.
Chris Drury essentially always puts the most positive spin possible on his postgame analyses regardless of the 60 or 65 minutes preceding them.
Who can forget Drury’s unfortunate response last season after the Rangers blew a second period 4-0 lead to lose to the Caps 5-4 in overtime on Dec. 23, 2008 in which he said, “It could be the most important point of the season, the one that gets us home-ice advantage; I’m not going to let it ruin my Christmas and I don’t think anyone else here is going to let it ruin their [holiday] break, either?”
Understand this, too, about Drury. He never speaks before thinking. He chooses his words carefully. He says exactly what he wants to say. He uses the cooling off period between the end of a game and the locker room being opened to the press to formulate his take.
And so following Tuesday’s unacceptable level of performance and work ethic in the 3-1 defeat at home to Montreal, Drury said exactly what he wanted to say when asked how his team could have come up so puny in such a meaningful game and why the Rangers have been so inconsistent most of the season.
“It’s immaturity,” he said. “That’s what it’s been all year.”
On Wednesday, Tortorella – the mayor, sheriff, beat cop, judge, jury, executioner and the justice of the peace all tightly wrapped into one – was asked about Drury’s opinion.
The coach, who has no trouble saying, “None of your business,” when asked about team matters, decided to make it what he thought of his captain’s comments, everybody’s business. The coach decided to correct the captain.
“No I don’t,” Tortorella said Wednesday when asked whether he agreed with his captain. “I think that’s the wrong word to use by Dru and we’ve ironed that out in the locker room.”
In other words, Big Brother needed to set the record straight and re-educate the population on the proper terminology to define his team’s failures. This was the dictatorship getting the captain’s mind right.
A couple of months ago after a particularly hideous 6-0 defeat in Montreal, Sean Avery indicted the team by saying, “It’s a lack of competitiveness…we do not play hard enough…it’s a lack of respect for our organization and fans…it’s a joke.”
A couple of days later Tortorella said that his players should, “Shut up and play.”
Avery has shut up. So have nearly all of his teammates, cowed into effective silence and self-censorship by the man wearing the tin star.
This totalitarian regime running the Rangers doesn’t want a strong personality emerging from the room. This regime wants to do the thinking for the players. It wants to do the talking for the players.
The Rangers are 70 games into the season with Game 71 coming up tonight at the Garden against the Blues. They have no identity. Check that. Their identity is wrapped up in Tortorella.
Their identity is Tortorella.
Tortorella doesn’t merely want to coach the Rangers. He wants to be the Rangers.
The Rangers have won 31 of 70 games.
How’s he doing?