Friday, February 4, 2011

Drury Out With Convienently Timed "Knee" Injury To Save Indignity of Healthy Scratch


Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
The precipitous decline in the performance and production of New York Rangers captain Chris Drury has been startling to see and depressing to watch.  It is inevitable that players will decline as they get older, but the difference in many is the rate at which that decline occurs.  For Drury it has been rapid and wrapped in the cloak of an already bloated contract for his prior level and the bright lights of being captain to an original six team on Broadway.  Today that saga took a very ugly turn in my opinion because beyond the problems with production you expect that accountability and team come before the pride of an individual player; especially the captain of a team.  That does not appear to be the case right now for the Rangers.
Over the past few weeks and even more the last week everyone has been doing the number count and wondering when it would be that captain Chris Drury would finally have his utter lack of production cause him to be scratched from the New York Rangers lineup.  In recent days there has been pushback by the club against that idea of scratching Drury and talking about what he brings to the club.  Conveniently now that Erik Christensen is ready to return to the lineup Chris Drury suddenly has a balky knee for the past few weeks and now it has flared to the point where he will miss the road trip.  That excuse does two things at least on its face; gives excuse for his poor play while being able to claim his absence is strictly the knee without having to call him a healthy scratch. 
Per the teams official twitter
Torts on Drury: "He has had cranky knee and has progressively gotten worse...gone a few weeks & flared up last night"
Torts: "He's played this game hard for a long time and I think it's a little bit of wear and tear...and it's just acting up on him now"
Sometimes you wonder when you follow an organization what they think about the intelligence of the fans they have and you look at this and it is hard not to take offense.  I understand the intent to save the captain’s pride and I even understand there is likely some legitimacy to the knee issue, but to encase what is going on here as solely that insults the intelligence of a loyal fanbase.
In the absence of Drury the team’s lines in practice today per Jim Cerny:
Prospal-Stepan-Gaborik
Dubinsky-Anisimov-Callahan
Wolski-Boyle-Prust
Avery-Christensen-Zuccarello

In other practice news Lundqvist stayed after practice to work on some things with MZA and Boyle.