The Backup Puts Up a "W"

After over a month of picking up dry cleaning, fetching coffee, and baby-sitting his teamate's offspring, Stephen Valiquette finally got a chance to actually have to add a cup to his gamenight attire on Saturday night in Toronto. Usually one would think that a backup goaltender for the New York Rangers would be getting the short end of the stick by having his only appearence of the first quarter of the season being away from the storied "World's Most Famous Arena". That was not the case for this game.

Valiquette, who last started a non pre-season game on March 3rd, was thrust into the spotlight of his hometown. A Saturday night, Hockey Night In Canada, on Hall of Fame Weekend is indeed a big spot to any hockey player from Canada. The game started a bit late due to a combined ceremony honoring this year's Hall of Fame inductees, along with a Remembrance Day ceremony honoring Canada's fallen soldiers.

So after having a little bit of extra time to soak in the atmosphere how did Valiquette perform between the pipes? I'd say he did pretty well. He stopped 32 of 34 shots and then stopped Nik Antropov and Mats Sundin in a shootout while both Ranger's shooters, Brendan Shanahan and Marcel Hossa, were succesful in their attempts.

Having Valiquette start tonight's game allows Tom Renney to give Henrik Lundqvist a full five days off between starts. With the season that Lundqvist is having, barring injury, these nights for Valiquette will be few and far between. Not that that is a bad thing, providing Lundqvist can keep up his performance there is no reason not to have him get the playing time that he has earned. The only numbers that Lundqvist has put up that are not incredible (W-L) are due to the other members of the team who are still in dead last in goals scored.

Perhaps this win could give Tom Renney a bit of confidence in Valiquette if he notices fatigue creeping into Lundqvist's game. One thing about sports though is that to win you need to have your best players playing. And that is certainly true in the Rangers' case. While the rest of the team takes it's sweet time trying to figure themselves out the one constant so far in the early going is that the Rangers have excellent goaltending. And tonight they got it from their backup.


Sidenote: Sean Avery had himself quite an active first 23 minutes to Saturday night's game in Toronto. He had 7 minutes in penalties in the first period, 2 for getting slapped around by three Maple Leafs, and 5 for having a decent fight with Darcy Tucker. In the second period, in one shift, he set up Brendan Shanahan's goal to make the score 1-0, with a beautiful backhand pass to the slot. 42 seconds later Avery made the score 2-0 with Shanahan getting the assist.

This is all great news, but Avery was a bit invisible after that. Maybe he wore himself out during warmups where he began his agitating of Darcy Tucker, which set off a bit of stick jabbing, pushing and shoving matches between players from both sides.