Marian Gaborik has been the New York Rangers best forward
thus far this season. Gaborik has
returned to the form of his first season in New York with four goals already
and showing the burst he never really had last season. With as well as Gaborik has been playing the
fact he was not playing for much of the third period against Winnipeg caused
concern for possible injury and/or anger at coach John Tortorella for possibly
benching the star winger. Luckily it
appears that neither of those was the case.
According to Larry Brooks at The
New York Post the reason that Gaborik only got four shifts and 3:03 of ice
time in the third period was because of the amount of time the team spent
pinned in their own end.
“It was not a benching,” Tortorella said. “Gabby has probably been our most consistent forward.”
There are those who still
want to see Gaborik get his ice time because of how good he has been and it is
hard to blame them for that. It was a
missed Gaborik shift that saw Prust, Richards and Fedotenko get pinned in the
defensive zone for nearly two minutes, but eventually led to the power play
that Callahan scored on. Once the
Rangers took the lead there was no reason to double shift Gaborik to make up for
the lost ice time, especially since there are forwards much better equipped to
preserve the lead. Sure Gaborik could go
out and make it a two goal game with another snipe and make the rest of the
game a little easier to take, but his line also could have been responsible for
giving up the tying goal and then Tortorella would have been hammered for
having him out there.
Gaborik will get
used and abused when the team is in need of a goal while down one or tied in
the third, so there is no reason to worry about running him out there when you
have the lead. That is the luxury of
having Callahan, Dubinsky, Boyle, Prust to sustain those third period
leads. Tortorella makes questionable
decisions with the lineup and the lines, but his use of Gaborik in the third
period Monday night was not one of them.
