Vladimir Tarasenko of the Florida Panthers scores a goal past Igor Shesterkin of the New York Rangers during the third period in Game Six of the Eastern Conference Final of the 2024 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Amerant Bank Arena on June 1 in Sunrise, Fla.Joel Auerbach/Getty Images
As it turns out, you can’t run the playoffs with a goalie driving the bus while everyone else sleeps in the back. The New York Rangers just tried it.
For a couple of weeks at the beginning, the Rangers were the NHL’s ice breaker. But putting the Carolina Hurricanes down 3-0 got them thinking about all the things that could happen next, which is neither good in sports nor in life.
Carolina couldn’t come all the way back, but the distance they did manage unbalanced New York. The Rangers shuffled into the Florida series no longer sure if they were supposed to be overachieving underdogs or underachieving favourites.
Florida has seen that sort of team before. For a long time, Florida was that sort of team. Now the Panthers are a club that plays you, not themselves.
You want to skate? They’ll skate with you. You want to score? They’ll score with you. You want to go low? Hold your hand as close to the ground as you can without touching and they’ll get under it.
Having taken the full measure of the Rangers and decided the only one that worried them was goalie Igor Shesterkin, the Panthers rattled him like a paint shaker. You know that plan is working when the only guy who wants to fight you for roughing up the goalie is the goalie.
With Shesterkin unhinged, Florida cleaned things up on Saturday night. This will be its second Stanley Cup final in a row, but the first in which it is favoured.
There is plenty of time – too much, really – to assess its chances. The final will start on Saturday and could stretch until June 24. Just in time to compete directly with the NBA Finals, Euro 2024 and being outside.
Why do the playoffs last more than nine weeks? Why do they take forever to get going and then stretch into the dog days? Thanks to global warming and NHL schedulers, a generation of children are going to grow up associating the most exciting part of the hockey season with killer heatwaves.
Anyway, there’s lots of time left to wonder why they begin the world’s premier hockey championships in banana-hammock weather. More than enough time to give New York its moment.
Everybody has their own list of the world’s greatest cities. If yours doesn’t include New York, I salute the ambition of your contrariness.
Coming from a place that is obsessed with its lack of world-class’edness, you can lose sight of the fact that America doesn’t have much better. There are a few decent cities in the United States, but only one New York. It is a place that transcends nationhood.
New York has to suffer somehow for its luck, and riding the subway isn’t sufficient. For a generation, the city’s main drawback has been its sports.
This is relative, of course. New York teams are great simply by virtue of playing where they do. But they’re mostly crap.
The most recent New York team to win a title is the Giants in 2012. They balanced that out by never being competent again.
The Yankees haven’t won since 2009 – their worst title gap since the eighties and early nineties.
After that, it goes off a cliff. Thirty years between trophies for the primary hockey club. Forty for the Mets and the Islanders. Fifty-one for the Knicks. Coming on 55 for the Jets.
For a long time, New York has been reminding other teams in other cities of an important rule – you don’t have to win to matter. The right sort of loser can still control the conversation. New York teams do this by losing with élan. They are never just bad. They are incandescently terrible. Players who are know-nothing/say-nothing drips elsewhere turn into chatty newsmakers the instant they cross any bridge onto Manhattan.
How about New York Mets pitcher Jorge López tossing his glove over the wire netting and into the crowd after being ejected from a game last week, then telling reporters he plays for “the worst team in MLB,” then being cut?
Not good, but interesting.
The number of major-league teams in New York ensures that no one takes too much of a beating (though the Jets and Mets try). Someone is always good enough that the miasma of perpetual loserdom cannot settle over the city. But nor is there ever a swell of across-the-board quality. New York has never had its Boston moment.
All of a sudden, there are rumblings.
The Rangers got to a league semis, and are just unaware enough to do it again.
Despite being undermanned and overwhelmed, the Knicks got within one game of a conference final.
Now that he’s not going to be on a presidential ticket – that we know of – Aaron Rodgers will lead the Jets into the next NFL campaign. It’s impossible to say if they’ll be good, but with a healthy Rodgers holding the wheel, they won’t be bad.
The Yankees lead the American League East and their most dangerous weapon, Gerrit Cole, hasn’t played yet this season.
Is it possible we are about to enter a world in which New York is good at sports? Could the Rangers, Knicks, Yankees and Jets be genuine contenders at the same time? Nothing’s unprecedented, but that’s close.
Great news for New York, New Yorkers and everyone who owns shares in a sports-related business. Bad news for everybody else.
New York has always accepted that the universe requires balance. If you get walking-distance access to the White Horse Tavern and The Frick Collection, you should not also have access to the Stanley Cup and a Super Bowl. It would be unfair.
But what hope do the rest of us have if that changes? What are we going to do once New York realizes that if you have enough money and cultural gravity, it may be possible to have it all, all of the time?