CHICAGO – Brad Brown, a Blackhawk for two years until the Oct. 5 trade that brought him and Michal Grosek to the Rangers for Stephane Quintal, wasn’t going to be nervous last night for his first game back against his former team.
“Oh, no; nothing like that at all,” the engaging 24-year-old defenseman said before the match. “I don’t have any feelings like that. I’m not even thinking about it.”
Not thinking about it – or thinking not to think about it?
“Well, yeah; I’m trying to block it out, if you want to know the truth,” he said. “I just need to focus on what I have to do on the ice and not get caught up in any pride kind of thing where I’m trying to show people that they made a mistake.”
Brown, who has moved up to the second defense pair with Kim Johnsson in the aftermath of Vladimir Malakhov’s opening game knee injury, certainly hasn’t been a mistake for the Rangers.
Truth, though, is that he, like most of his teammates, made plenty of mistakes in the consecutive losses to Pittsburgh and Anaheim that brought the Blueshirts into last night’s match with a 2-2 record.
After two games of tight work in their own end that produced a pair of victories, the Rangers broke down repeatedly in their defeats. The coverage in front was dreadful. The physical game along the boards and in the corners was lacking. Attempts to break out with cohesion were overwhelming fruitless.
“We didn’t have good enough communication or trust in one another,” Brown said. “There were shifts where we’d come off and then on the bench we’d look at each other like, ‘What?’ We have to do a lot more talking out there, which is something we talked about at the morning skate.
“We have to be much more physical. It’s not just taking the man into the boards and then turning away, so he can slip behind you and get to the net; we have to take the body, then pin the man.
“And the third thing, we have to trust our teammates. The last couple of games, for whatever reason, we were trying to do each other’s job. Once you have that, once you leave your position to help in a way you’re not supposed to, everything starts to break down.”
The Blackhawks entered this season with general manager Mike Smith starting his first full year in that capacity and with Alpo Suhonen starting his first season behind the bench. Brown said that his teammates in training camp were all expecting changes, and that being traded surprised him only because he hadn’t heard his name come up in rumors.
“You know that a new GM and a new coach want their own players,” said Brown, originally a first-round 1994 draft selection of the Canadiens who was sent to Chicago with Jocelyn Thibault and Dave Manson for Jeff Hackett and Eric Weinrich early in the 1998-99 season.
“Stephane [Quintal] had played for Mike when he was GM in Winnipeg, so I can understand why he’d want him; also, all during camp we kept hearing they wanted to bring in a veteran on D.
“The only thing was, we kept hearing that [defensemen] Jamie Allison and Anders Eriksson were probably going to be moved, so that’s why I was a bit surprised.
“But you know what? It was all for the best, really. If I’d been traded someplace crummy, maybe I’d have a bit of a different attitude coming into the game, but they traded me to such a great place, they did me a favor.”
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Ron Low yesterday named Mike Richter as his starting goaltender for Sunday night’s Garden match against Tampa Bay. And it will be Sunday night, not Sunday afternoon.
The Devils apparently were unable to switch their Saturday night game against the Lightning at the Meadowlands to the afternoon, thus preventing the Rangers from moving the Sunday game up from its 7:00 start because the league has a rule that forbids teams from playing a day game after a night game.
Thus, the Devils on Saturday and the Rangers on Sunday will play in front of thousands and thousands and thousands of empty seats while going up against the first two games of the Subway Series.