IT’S safe to come back to the Garden again. After four years of Tim Sweeneys and Stephane Quintals, emptiness of both the hockey soul and paid-up seats, the Flyers and the Rangers were back getting it on last night before a roaring, profane, even brawling, mob.
“Ranger fans pouring beer over Flyers fans’ heads,” Glen Sather said. “Old time hockey.”
The visitors, exiled to the who-cares fringes of New York’s sporting psyche by the Rangers’ decline, were confirmed by chanting fans to be resuming what Potvin used to do. The Flyers threw Eric Lindros out of the alley where they’ve dwelled ever since their miserable birth and the 6-4, 240-pound waif paid them back with the game’s first goal, a third-period assist on Theo Fleury’s game-winner and a thunderous lay-out of Jeremy Roenick down the stretch of the 4-2 victory.
While Mike Richter was standing on his head, the blood was rushing back into playoff-and excitement starved puckheads.
“I think it’s because of the winning,” said Sather, but the Rangers have had little modest spurts of success of almost this length during the last four years and never had a crowd fired up like this for even the Devils. This had much to do with Lindros, the game he brings, the emotions he stirs and the hope he returns.
Nobody at the Garden last night would dare say the trade so ridiculed in August was not the right thing to do. The Rangers’ hopes at making the playoffs assuredly will last only as long as does Lindros, but they weren’t getting to the post-season with any of the three guys they gave up for him.
Kim Johnsson has been a nice fit for the Flyers, who needed a defenseman who can move the puck, Jan Hlavac has only 20-goal hands to go with 40-goal speed and Pavel Brendl, who was a healthy scratch last night, has an excellent chance to become the most unfinished project in Philadelphia since Darryl Dawkins.
That was the best Bob Clarke could do for a star with questionable durability, who few teams could afford, and who offered a short list of places he would go.
“When the Rangers came along, there were no other choices,” Clarke said before the game. “We filled holes, got some young players who will play for us for a long time.
“We knew [Lindros] was the best player in the deal and if it works out, we probably got the short end. But how are you going to get a player of equal talent?”
The Flyers, loaded as they haven’t been since winning their last Cup in 1975, were taking the bigger risk of essentially revitalizing their once and again arch-enemies. The Rangers’ risk is entirely measured, against little downside.
Unless you want to believe Sather should have been willing to put Radek Dvorak into a deal for Jaromir Jagr, or that the Rangers had an excess of the young, cheap assets the Penguins took from Washington, Lindros was the best way to go to revitalize the Rangers in a hurry, at minimal cost to the future.
Jagr, who pouted his way out of Pittsburgh, who has had his share of injuries, had a risk factor, too, if you were going to put him on a stripped-down team he would have to carry. Under the circumstances, this was Sather’s better move. If Lindros holds up, the only remaining issue will be the ongoing one between him and the Flyers’ management.
“When he attacked our trainer like he did and it wasn’t the truth, enough was enough and we had to start fighting back,” Clarke said. “We put up with it for eight years without saying a word.
“What you know about it is not very good and what you don’t know is way worse. I hope it goes to bed, but we are not going to be pushed around by this family. Maybe after tonight, everybody will get on with their lives.”
If that means going back to the last four years, that’s the last place anybody at the Garden last night wants to go.
“The Flyers versus the New York Rangers always has been a good rivalry,” said Bill Barber, coaching in the minors and living in a cave the last four years. “When people start writing it’s so-and-so against so-and-so, it takes away from the game itself.”
On the contrary, the game itself here needed this terribly.
