Reversal of roles
Imagining a realm where Rangers are Garden's inept, bungling franchise
IN AN alternate universe, Glen Sather (@FiveRingsSlats) is impugning Henrik Lundqvist’s character yet again on Twitter, hoping this latest personal attack might be the tipping point in the club president’s campaign to convince the Rangers’ franchise goaltender to waive his no-move clause and accept a trade out of New York.
There is a report from Sweden that Lundqvist’s fellow countrymen, Henrik and Daniel Sedin, are urging their Canucks to deal for Lundqvist even at the cost of 21-year-old burgeoning star center Bo Horvat.
Lundqvist schedules his fourth meeting of the season with Sather, after which the King says he and his wife love New York as much as ever, and just hours before which he is pulled for the seventh time in a stretch of 10 games, nine of which the Rangers have lost as the club appears headed for yet another playoff miss.
Sather lauds an article written by a longtime crony in which Lundqvist is depicted as selfish before the president cites a longforgotten and troubled bit player whom he had coached at the start of his career in the WHA as comparable to one of the Rang- ers’ greatest all-time players.
Pavel Buchnevich, who is having an excellent rookie season, flies home to Russia on a game day apparently because he misses his family, does not inform the Rangers and declines to answer the team’s calls. The winger returns the next day and is promptly reinserted into the lineup.
The Blueshirts lose after holding a lead in the last minute for the fourth straight time on a night a story breaks that Sidney Crosby is pushing management to acquire Lundqvist even though the Penguins have no need for him. Crosby denounces the story and its writer as trash. Lundqvist is silent when asked if he would indeed waive his no-move to go to Pittsburgh.
Sean Avery and Neil Smith show up for a home game in adjacent seats just a few rows behind Garden owner Jim Dolan and are both dragged away, cuffed and arrested when a kerfuffle with se- curity ensues after the two former Blueshirts employees — each persona non grata under the pinwheel ceiling — either did or did not persist in screaming epithets at Dolan after being warned not to do so.
Alain Vigneault, fired years ago despite success at the start of his career as a Ranger, refuses comment as the team is on its third coach since his exit from New York.
General manager Jeff Gorton volunteers to act as an intermediary between Sather and Lundqvist after the team executive is overheard talking about the good old days in the NHL before chicken Swedes started showing up on rosters.
Bobby Holik is quoted by Slap Shots saying that nothing has changed since that fateful day in January 2004 when he stepped up to proclaim the Rangers for whom he played were fundamentally the worst team in the NHL.
Friends of Lundqvist are quoted anonymously in one Swedish publication that he would never allow Sather to force him and his family out of New York. Different friends are quoted in a different Swedish newspaper suggesting Lundqvist might accept a trade to Ottawa. The latter story is believed to have originated with Daniel Alfredsson, the Senators’ senior advisor of hockey operations.
Sather responds by tweeting that the Rangers might not allow Lundqvist to play for the Swedish Olympic Team in the 2018 Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, even if the NHL agrees to participate in the event.
And as the Rangers continue to lose ground in the playoff picture and the team is again the epitome of dysfunction and the stuff of back-page ridicule, players wonder why they can’t be like the Knicks, their basketball brothers, who are well on their way to the playoffs for the seventh straight time and 11th time in a 12-year span in which stability has reigned.
Lundqvist, meanwhile, only wishes he could be treated with the same kind of utmost respect that resident Knicks superstar Carmelo Anthony has been throughout his tenure on Broadway, even and especially this season, in which he had uncharacteristically struggled before getting his game back on track.
An alternate universe, friends, an alternate universe.