The locker room smells actively rank, the smell only freshly dampened hockey equipment can produce. There are about 40 people moving about frantically, some Islanders players undressing and heading to the showers, some young public relations men in suits trying to rein in the chaos, and a handful of media people, including one cameraman, moving from station to station conducting interviews as if on a conveyor belt.
The losing goalie, Rick DiPietro, steadies himself before the scrum and looks up as if he’s in a hurry. He’s already told the assembled ragtag group of media to come back once, and now they are reassembling in front of him as the rest of Nassau Coliseum empties out.
It’s December 2006, and the 25-year-old was in nets for all of a 4-2 loss to the Canadiens, two of the goals coming on distinct deflections and one coming through a screen. He hardly moved his head as any of them went by.
It’s about 10 months after DiPietro was named the best goalie in the United States, starting for his country in the Turin Olympics. The only reporter who covers the team on a daily basis asks him about the goals. “It didn’t seem like you were seeing the puck all that well tonight,” the reporter says.
“The goals were on deflections and screens,” DiPietro responds. “I saw the puck just fine.”
More questions. More short answers. The camera turns off. The reporters walk away.
DiPietro calls out to the man who asked the first question.
“You don’t watch the game,” DiPietro insists. “You gotta watch the game!”
A young man standing nearby, still wet behind the ears, gets an impression of DiPietro, an impression that’s not too different from what he’s heard about the combustible netminder. Walking out, he looks back and DiPietro is shuffling with his pads, still shaking his head at the notion of someone thinking he didn’t see the puck well.
That guy’s gotta watch the freaking game!
*
“I remember it, sure,” DiPietro told The Post in mid-August, about that day five years ago. “You get poked and prodded with enough of the right questions, you’re going to aggravated. Everyone does, right?”
DiPietro is laying face down on a trainer’s table at the Islanders’ facility in Syosset, getting his hips massaged as he readies himself for an offseason skate, three weeks before training camp opens this Saturday.
“Sometimes you feel like you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t, just because you don’t want to throw around clichés the whole time,” DiPietro said. “Then there are going to be times when a person’s true feelings come out. You know, that’s what the people want, right? They want you to be real, and show emotion and show you care.
“I don’t think it’s ever been a question that I care more about winning and this organization than a lot of people,” he continued, “and if that comes off as me having an attitude every once in a while, I apologize, but it’s never meant to be that way.”
It’s been a long time since that day, and like all of us, DiPietro is a different person. It was only three months before his off-camera outburst that DiPietro signed the first modern day NHL mega-deal, getting a 15-year contract worth $67.5 million. The deal was laughed at by league rivals — who spent a couple years laughing then quickly started replicating — and owner Charles Wang was remembered mostly as the man who walked into his first press conference in 2000 holding the book “Hockey for Dummies.”
Like most huge contracts, it was hard for DiPietro to live up to the expectations. The season following his Olympic run and the signing of the deal, DiPietro put up a 2.58 goals-against average and led the Islanders to the playoffs as the final seed in the East. They ended up taking only one game in a first-round loss to the Sabres, keeping the franchise’s streak alive — zero playoff series won since 1993.
“The bigger the contract, the more pressure there is,” DiPietro says now. “Throughout a long-term contract like that, there will be years when you’re underpaid and there will be years when you’re overpaid. That’s just the commitment both sides make. Winning cures everything. The Stanley Cup and being successful here will definitely validate the contract.”
The summer of 2007, DiPietro went home, relaxed, and got ready for not just the next season of promise, but for a career full of it. It was the last summer before this one that he would spend training rather than rehabbing an injury.
In the 2007-08 season, DiPietro started a career-high 63 games. In the three years since, he’s started 39 games – combined.
“The past three years, for both of us, have been as tough as it’s ever been,” says DiPietro’s wife of two years (and girlfriend of 10), Cassandra. “I’ve felt for him. It’s like he lost his identity, everything he knew was taken away from him. He felt helpless, worthless, depressed. And there was nothing I can do to help.”
It goes something like this: surgery on both knees, surgery on his hip, groin injuries, neck injuries and numerous concussions. And with DiPietro’s unending desire to get back on the ice as fast as possible, no matter the team’s standing, many of the injuries were not given as much time to recover as most doctors would’ve liked.
To look at DiPietro’s face when he’s talking about all his injuries is like being a fly on the wall in a psychiatrist’s office.
“You don’t feel a part of it, there’s no way to contribute,” DiPietro said. “It’s definitely one of the more depressing things as a professional athlete you have to go through.”
“I think the best word to describe what Rick has gone through the last few years is resilient,” said Islanders general manager Garth Snow, who was a teammate and fellow goalie with DiPietro for four years before retiring and immediately being named GM in 2006. “The one thing that you don’t have control over as professional athlete is injuries, and in Rick’s case they happened a little more frequently then anyone expected. With his resiliency to get back to his level when he was an All-Star, playing 50 games, I give him a lot of credit.”
No setback in DiPietro’s career was more brutal, more publicly baring, and more widely criticized then what happened last Feb. 2, as DiPietro finally made his way back onto the ice for some meaningless games in order to sharpen up for this coming season. His team was 16-28-7, had won just a single game in the month of November, and was far on the outside of the playoff picture.
As a scrum broke out amongst the Islanders and Penguins skaters, DiPietro took off his helmet and began to skate out to mid-ice, staring down his opposing netminder, Brent Johnson. DiPietro wishes now that he knew Johnson was 6-foot-3 and had a left arm that hung down around his knees. He found out quickly, as the two engaged and Johnson leveled DiPietro with one punch, shattering his right orbital bone and dropping him to the ice in Pittsburgh like a rag doll.
He didn’t play for another month and a half, getting plates put into his face and allowing his surgically repaired right knee to stop swelling.
“I would put myself in the [category of] hockey player who happens to play goalie,” he said. “I enjoy fighting and I enjoy trying to contribute. That becomes a frustrating part of the game for me sometimes; as a goalie you’re kind of limited in how much you can do.
“At that point in the season, we were losing, and I was trying to stir it up a little bit, and maybe change the momentum of the season,” he continued. “I mean, it worked. I wish you told me at the beginning of the year that getting into a fight like that would have changed our luck a little bit and I would have done it in a heartbeat.”
After that game, the young Islanders went 14-11-6, somewhat righting a sinking ship. And if it was DiPietro finding an unconventional way to contribute, it wouldn’t be the first time.
*
Jack Parker heard about this high school phenom goalie from a pretty credible source: 1980 U.S. Olympic team captain Mike Eruzione. As the longtime coach at Boston University, Parker had seen some of the best come and go, including Eruzione. But now the Olympic star was telling Parker he found the next great goalie, a kid from his hometown of Winthrop, Mass., playing at the famed prep school, St. Sebastian’s.
“He was pretty confident from before we met him,” Parker said of the young DiPietro. “I was always amazed at how cool and calm and collected he was. He was a fabulous goaltender in high school and college.”
One of the things that drew Parker to DiPietro was his uncanny ability to move the puck. Few goalies in history are as great with the puck on their blade as they are stopping it with their bodies, and Parker was afraid that DiPietro’s frequent play out of the crease would stunt his growth in it.
“But it didn’t affect his effectiveness at all,” Parker said. “I knew it was something we didn’t want to take away from him.”
Parker can’t remember the exact game, but it was during that freshman season — the only season DiPietro would spend in college — that the risk-taking goalie misplayed a puck in the corner and it resulted in a first-period goal. Parker intentionally didn’t say a word to DiPietro at intermission, and within the first two minutes of the second period, without hesitation, DiPietro jumped out of the crease and into the corner, retrieved a puck and fed it to a streaking left winger, starting an offensive breakout.
“We knew right then it was no problem,” Parker said.
Nearing the end of that year, DiPietro started talking with then-Islanders GM Mike Milbury. The conversations were ones that would make any 18-year-old’s head swell, with Milbury telling the college freshman he was going to be the savior of a franchise, he was going to be the first goalie since Michel Plasse in 1968 to be taken with the No. 1 overall pick, he was going to be loved by all of the people of the greatest city on Earth.
“When Milbury told him he’d take him No. 1, it was a feather in the cap,” Parker said. “Ricky was pretty sure he was coming back. But Milbury said, ‘I’m going to anoint Rick DiPietro.’ That’s the only reason he chose to leave was to be the No. 1 pick. If he was No. 6, he wouldn’t have done it.”
The draft rules have changed since then, and now DiPietro would have been allowed to return to school after being drafted. Instead, Milbury traded the young goalie on his roster that everyone had already said would be great, Roberto Luongo, to make room for DiPietro on the NHL ice. It didn’t take him long to get out there, as a 19-year-old DiPietro went 3-15-1 with a 3.49 GAA in 2000-01. He didn’t return to the NHL until the end of the 2002-03 season.
“I really thought he’d be a longtime NHLer, and he is,” Parker said. “I think he’s a No. 1 NHL goalie. But there’s a lot that has stopped him from becoming Marty Brodeur.”
*
After the massage back in the training room in Syosset, DiPietro heads out to the ice with 18-year-old sniper Nino Niederreiter and a local forward, Tony Romano, who plays for the Islanders’ minor league team in Bridgeport, Conn. Joined by goalie coach Sudarshan Maharaj (hockey name: “Sudsy”) and NHL veteran Miroslav Satan (who lives on Long Island and is looking for a job), DiPietro begins to skate around and warm up.
He saunters in between the pipes. He looks down at his new — but retro — light-brown leg pads and matching waffle on his left wrist. He then snaps his head up and focuses his eyes upward through the face mask, like only goalies can.
The group spends about 10 minutes sending soft shots that DiPietro kicks away. Then one puck begins to float back and forth across the ice, ends up on the blade of Niederretier and is rifled over DiPietro’s right shoulder, snapping the net backwards.
He finds the lone puck behind him and flings it out to center ice with a loud and unprintable exclamation.
A couple pucks later, Niederreiter fires the same shot and DiPietro whips his glove up and catches it with a crack of leather. He doesn’t say a word, tosses the puck aside, and looks to the next one already moving, already looking like pucks used to look with him in net – like they’re destined to disappear somewhere within his person.
“I put more pressure on myself to be successful than anyone could,” DiPietro said afterwards. “It [really] kills me to not be what I expected to be so far. I’m trying hard now to rectify that.”
To rectify opportunities lost is a heavy weight to carry, but one that is on DiPietro’s shoulders nonetheless. Come Monday, when he turns 30, a lot of pressure will be on the finally-healthy goalie, who is now closer to the back end of his career than the front.
“His 20s weren’t so good,” Cassandra DiPietro says, “so his 30s has to be better.”
For the first time in a long time, the Islanders enter a year with DiPietro in nets and a legitimate expectation of making the playoffs.
So is it a make-or-break year?
“Oh yeah,” DiPietro said.
And a lot of that depends on …
“Me,” he said quickly. “That’s understandable. I agree 100 percent.”
Snow, on the other hand, isn’t ready to risk his team’s fate on DiPietro’s inconsistent health. Last season, Snow claimed former Vezina Trophy finalist Evgeni Nabokov off of waivers, but like many free agents in the recent past, Nabokov spurned the Islanders and decided to sit out the season. Yet Snow said that he recently sat with Nabokov for dinner, and the two are on the same page concerning his future on Long Island. To solidify that, Nabokov got to training camp early and has been skating on Long Island for over a week.
“It’s not a situation where it’s one side versus the other,” Snow said. “We’re in it to win enough hockey games to solidify a playoff position, then compete for a Stanley Cup. We’re all pulling the rope in the same direction.”
DiPietro said he has no opinion either way about Nabokov’s signing, but he will welcome him into camp with open arms.
“Hopefully he has a good camp, and, you know, I’m coming to go to work,” DiPietro said. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this business it’s not to take anything for granted. One thing I do every summer – well, more this summer – is make sure I come to camp as ready to go as I’ve ever been.”
The franchise will also be dealing with the overhanging issue of the decrepit Nassau Coliseum, which is entering its 40th year. On Aug. 1, Nassau County voters rejected a joint proposal by the Islanders and the county executive for a new arena to replace the Coliseum, and with the current lease set to expire at the end of 2015, the future of the once-proud franchise is uncertain.
“The best way to get people to want a new arena or to push for a new arena is to win hockey games and make the playoffs and be successful,” DiPietro said. “That’s everyone’s main focus.”
So now, finally, the focus returns to the ice. More appropriately, the blue ice between the pipes, where the spotlight will be the brightest on a man who has never reflected it back with the image he has desired.
“Like anyone else, you want people to like you,” DiPietro said. “At the end of the day, you’re only human, and no one likes being a villain or a jerk.
“I remember being a kid, [and] you want kids to appreciate what you’re doing,” he continued. “You want fans to appreciate what you’re doing, and that’s the thing I cherish the most – how the fans feel about me. I want them to know how hard I work and how much I care. I don’t want them to think I’m a spoiled athlete and I take this for granted.”
The wet hair in DiPietro’s face and the preemptive playoff beard are beginning to show signs of gray. The Islanders goalie tosses his head, his pads again starting to give the empty locker room that distinctive odor.
The look on his face says he is again ready, now it’s just up to everyone else to watch the freaking game.