You watch pretty much every playoff game every night and it strikes you how every crowd in every building is pumped and loud and noisy and filled with energy that transmits on some level to the home team.
Except in New York.
Except at the Garden.
Except in Rangerstown.
Except at the World’s Most Silent and Sullen Arena.
I would tell you that I grew up in Section 419 (when it actually was 419) when the Blue Seats carried a connotation all its own, except that I actually grew up (well, that most certainly is up for debate) in the Old Garden, balancing on the rails between rows while standing sideways in the side balcony when tickets cost 50 cents on my G.O. card.
Which is to say that I understand what it is to be a Rangers fan, but also is to say I don’t understand the breed of fan filling this revamped Garden these days and during these playoffs. You know what the transformation did? It transformed MSG into a place without a voice, a place without a pulse and a place in which the home team has no home-ice advantage whatsoever.
Sounds of silence.
I do get this: The customers are always right. The players get paid an enormous amount of money to play hockey for a living — an absurd amount, really. The customers, meanwhile, pay a comparatively absurd amount — not just in New York, but across the continent — to watch these athletes play. And I am paid a fair amount to watch and write about hockey games.
So I have no standing to scold.
But I am obligated to share my opinion and chronicle what I see and hear, and don’t see and don’t hear. And what I see and hear is a crowd at the Garden that is in a perpetual thumbs-down mode and creates an atmosphere that sucks the air right out of the game.
Listen to the crowd in Minnesota. Can’t you hear the folks in Montreal? The fans in those cities, they’re the seventh men for their respective teams.
Where is the seventh man here? Off in the spanking new concourse purchasing the world’s most expensive hamburger?
What are you going to do? Boo Rick Nash in Sunday’s potential-elimination Game 6 whenever he touches the puck the way he was booed in the third period of Game 4?
It isn’t everyone, I get that. Maybe the honest-to-goodness fans who bleed blue for their team simply are swallowed up by the gentrified arena that offers the plushy comforts of home without a home-ice advantage. Maybe the bluebloods who used to sit up in the nosebleeds simply have been priced out.
Maybe the swells downstairs save their breath for John Amirante, the anthem singer who seems to evoke the most positive vocal response in the arena. By the way, does anyone call it “downstairs” anymore, or is there some sponsored buzz-phrase description for the seats closest to the ice? Oh, I know: Wall Street.
Maybe it’s the New Yankee Stadium Syndrome: a landmark selling everything including its soul.
The Rangers are not a perfect team. But they are in the second round of the playoffs, and they are one of just two teams in the NHL — along with the powerful Kings — to have won at least one round in each of the past three years. So maybe the Rangers are not Boston or Chicago. But they’re not the Islanders or Blues or Sharks or Sabres or Panthers, and they’re not the Devils, either. So what is there to be so sullen about all the time?
The Rangers won 20 out of 41 at the Garden and 25 out of 41 on the road during the regular season. They have split six at home and six on the road in the playoffs. There are no excuses, and not one player has, to my knowledge, ever looked for one, but there is such a thing as cause-and-effect.
Every other team in the playoffs plays in a home environment intimidating for the visitors. The Rangers play surrounded by Sounds of Silence. Well, except for when they are booed.
It is all such sweet music for the visitors.