Jody Shelley was on the other side of the continent as a member of the Sharks when the Flyers’ Daniel Carcillo punched away at Marian Gaborik without intervention in the Jan. 21 fight at Philadelphia that represents one of the saddest chapters of the Rangers’ season.
But Shelley, the renowned 34-year-old heavyweight who became a Ranger in a Feb. 12 trade, remembers his reaction when he saw the exchange on television and knows how he feels about it.
“It would have to be a major thing for me to fight a guy like Gaborik,” Shelley told The Post. “My reaction is that a player like that would have to punch me three times in the face before I’d go with him.
“He’d have to batter me three times in the face. Then it would be on. I would never initiate with a player like that. But I would finish it.”
Gaborik did drop his gloves first during the scrum that began with a confrontation between Brandon Dubinsky and Olle-Kristian Tollefson, but he threw no punches at Carcillo after grabbing onto the Flyer’s jersey. Carcillo showed no mercy, pounding away while Rangers did a recreation of the Dave Schultz-Dale Rolfe incident that 36 years later lives in infamy.
Carcillo showed no mercy, most thought he showed no class and Rangers head coach John Tortorella thought he displayed a lack of honor.
Today, the Rangers get their first shot to get their shots in at Carcillo, who will skate onto the Garden ice with his teammates after escaping suspension for shoving linesman Greg Devorski following an altercation with Boston’s Matt Hunwick.
But if the Blueshirts were too consumed with “getting the two points,” back in Philadelphia when the season was 51 games young, it’s not likely they will risk spending much time in the penalty box now that every game carries the hyperbolic tag of “do-or-die.”
“I’m sure that we’re going to talk about what happened in that game and how we should play this one,” Vinny Prospal said. “How will we react? That’s what we have to talk about.”
Sean Avery, who fought Scott Hartnell in Philadelphia a few shifts after the incident in Philly, likely is to return following his banishment to street clothes (albeit fairly stylish ones) in Atlanta, but No. 16 already has crosshairs on his back from all angles, so he will have to be careful not to incite something for which he will pay the most dearly.
In fact, it most likely will fall to Shelley to stand up for the honor of his team and his teammate, even though he wasn’t even near the scene of the crime in January.
But that pretty much has been Shelley’s job description since his NHL debut with Columbus in 2000-01. His fight card, as detailed on the Web site Hockeyfights.com, lists 133 career bouts. Essentially all have involved the league’s best-known enforcers as opponents, from Tie Domi to Craig Berube to Colton Orr, over whom Shelley scored a TKO four days before being acquired to replace Donald Brashear on the Rangers roster.
“I’m going give the generic answer to how I see this,” Shelley said on Friday. “We have to win. That’s where we are right now in the season.
“They’re coming into our building, we’re a desperate team and we need to win. Whether there’s anything beyond that, that’s not for me to say.
“We’ll see how it goes.”