Apparently not wanting Scott Gomez to enjoy Montreal’s victory too much, Sean Avery slashed his ex-teammate on the back of the leg with seven seconds remaining.
“Gave the fans a little treat, I guess,” said Gomez. “But two points and we’re out of here.”
Plenty fast enough, too, to leave town seven points up on the team that dumped him. And not quite fast enough to save Gomez from getting booed almost every time he touched the puck.
“In New Jersey they don’t even boo [Brian] Gionta, and they still boo me there,” he said with a smile. “Do these people know [this time] I got traded?”
Must have been the season Gomez had last year, when he missed time near the start with a broken foot and arguably should have missed more time later on, when he performed dreadfully. To put it the way John Tortorella would, Gomez was more “disengaged” than someone making $8 million on the second year of a seven-year deal should have been.
Desperate to clear cap space, Glen Sather fortunately found a taker in Montreal in exchange for the limited Christopher Higgins and a promising defenseman named Ryan McDonagh. But Gomez essentially was moved to make room for Marian Gaborik, a player proven much more capable of earning big money, even if one never would have known it last night.
The Rangers, Gaborik included, had nothing for a Montreal team that moved seven points ahead of them. If Tortorella’s team has more of the same for St. Louis tomorrow night, and then for the one team the standings still insist the Rangers have a chance to catch, Boston, then this will be all over but the shouting by Sunday evening.
In that case one wonders if Sather will be given any further opportunity by Jim Dolan to get over it. As for Gomez’s own Ranger experience, he has not, even if he was careful last night to try to say the right things.
New Jersey and a four-line system hadn’t been enough for him, he wanted Manhattan. And within two years, never mind that the first one culminating in Gomez being an essential difference in a first-round series in which the Rangers left the Devils in his dust, he got dumped for a place where not only are the taxes higher, but so is the profile, and not always in a good way.
“Somebody said going from New York to Montreal is like going from the stove to the microwave,” he said. “It’s like New York in that if you don’t win, they will let you know.
“But here you are in a category below the Yankees, whatever the order is. I get recognized walking around New York[he has kept his place in Chelsea] and still do your own thing.
“[Montreal] is what it is. When you are losing, you tend to find yourself at home a little more.”
He can get out more now. The Canadiens, sucking serious wind before the Olympic break, getting a lot of the same Scotty the Rangers received last season, have won six straight, Gomez and linemates Gionta and Benoit Pouliot being a growing factor in their success.
“No kidding, when I got traded, I remembered what Alex Mogilny once told me,” said Gomez. “He said, ‘you will be traded one day in your career, just hope it’s in the summer. The whole rest of the day I was laughing. AlMo was right.
“I was going to Montreal, I’d heard good things, and it was a hockey city. You’re a little shocked but you move on.
“I wasn’t healthy all [last] season, but it doesn’t matter now. It’s one of those things. I can’t sit here and say anything bad about the Ranger organization, they were outstanding to me and my family. It could have gone better, but I don’t look back.”
Well, actually he did when Avery, ambassador of the great city of New York, whacked Gomez in the back of the leg, just in case he hadn’t let the door hit him in the behind on the way out of town last summer.