ERIC Lindros took out Dan Hinote on Vladimir Malakhov’s goal, took Adam Foote to the corner on Theo Fleury’s. Basically, Lindros took Colorado to the woodshed last night without scoring a goal.
The Stanley Cup champions, coming off three straight shutouts, were hanging on for dear life for 60 minutes against a player so big and dominant that there still was room for his teammates to ride his coattails, too.
It is not just Lindros’s munchkin linemates, Mike York and Fleury, who benefit from playing with the biggest, baddest superstar the game has ever known. As the Rangers built a 5-1 lead and cruised to a 5-3 victory, the trickle-down effect hit a gusher.
Lindros was on the bench while Mikael Samuelsson, a third-line player, was scoring the first two goals of his NHL career and Manny Malhotra was swinging wide to set up Zdeno Ciger. But you could have sworn the Avalanche was feeling No. 88’s presence regardless.
That’s what a dominating, physical player like the Rangers haven’t had since Mark Messier in his 1994 prime is doing to enable them to run up early standings points they won’t have to give back in March, to make the Garden’s hockey team worth watching for the first time in half a decade. Not only is Lindros, whose hands seem all the way back from his year of exile, owning the slot, but helping to put support players in the right slots.
“Eric usually gets 22-23 minutes a night, and when he’s on the ice that much and his line is a plus, it takes a lot of the burden off the other guys,” said coach Ron Low. “They do the defensive job and can also put the puck in the net, a great bonus.”
Lindros, York and Fleury do the defensive job because they always have the puck, a plus that can’t be fully measured statistically, but in the legs and backs of defensemen who don’t have to handfight in front of the net or play the puck very often with their backs against the wall. When one line owns the ice, everybody else’s job becomes easier.
“I don’t mind matching head to head when other teams put their top line against Eric, because they have done such a great job,” said Low. “Petr [Nedved] and Mark [Messier] have been excellent in whatever roles I’ve put them. With an obvious first line, the whole thing is more balanced.”
For four years that dead-ended into silent springs, the Rangers only had first lines that obviously weren’t first lines. Wayne Gretzky could have still anchored one if they had provided him a winger, but that’s another old story, the untold part of it being what the absence of a first line does through the remaining forward units.
Mike Keane, a big contributor on Cup winners in three different cities, practically stopped checking in New York from the expectation that he had to score and wound up useless to infuse resolve into a declining team. During desperate years plagued by bad planning, marked by signees past their primes taking money they knew in their hearts they couldn’t earn, Rangers who could have been contributors under better circumstances, proved in over their heads.
Twenty-nine of the team’s conference-leading 65 goals have been scored by the Lindros line, a ratio that will become a concern when the checking gets tighter and the burden on him gets dangerously heavy. But if the Rangers, who got Samuelsson in the Adam Graves deal, who picked up Andreas Johanasson in the 2000 waiver draft, seem more competitive around the edges of their roster while waiting for opportunities to get clearly better, it is because their singers are a little freer to sing and their dancers to dance.
Radek Dvorak, off to a disappointing start, ultimately will have to score. So will Messier, if he believes himself still capable of anchoring a second line. Nedved isn’t suited to be playing between two checkers, either.
It’s still early. Freshness, which the Rangers have in modicum with seven new faces, and enthusiasm, which they have in abundance with so many comebacks going so well, traditionally can take a team farther before another Messier birthday (Jan. 18) than after it. But as long as Lindros can keep ducking elbows to the head, the Rangers will benefit from having a true, climb-on-my-back horse.
