Hockey-Hockey-Hockey Chameleon

The Rangers must really want me to like them. I must resist. (Photo: Flickr user Bari D)

Note from 10/16/09: In this piece, I mention at the end that a bunch of my favorite players were picked up by the ECHL’s Charlotte Checkers. Two days after I posted that, nearly everyone was either released or put on injured reserve. So the whole last three paragraphs of this piece no longer makes sense. The rest of it is good though.

I typically despise anything New York City related. An ex-boyfriend dumped me years back because I was from upstate and he was from downstate, and thus the differences were too great to navigate. Rochester-born me wasn’t too fond of the metro New York area before that, and after that, really started to dislike the city that everyone else loves.

I moved to Boston, a place where everyone shares my general disdain for Jay-Z’s favorite city that doesn’t sleep, and have settled nicely into disparaging the Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets and Knicks along with any anonymous person I run into on the street.

Until this month, that is.

You see, the New York Rangers are trying to win me over. First, they signed Matt Gilroy, the most revered Boston University hockey player of the last decade.  That alone wasn’t going to sway me. Then, they resigned left winger and Rochester-bred Ryan Callahan. Okay, fine. A Rochester kid is playing in the NHL. No biggy. He’s not the only one.

Then the Rangers actually kept John Tortorella on as coach, tantrums and all. Torts was my favorite Amerks coach of my Rochester days, leading the Amerks to a Calder Cup in 1996. Then Torts went and grabbed former BU center, Mike Sullivan, as his assistant coach. At this point, the Rangers began to really nag me, like Philip, the boy in my first grade class who kept trying to tell me he liked me by comparing me to the token females in old school Nintendo games. No, Rangers. Stop trying to suck up to me. Stop telling me I’m your Zelda and you’re going to rescue me from whatever. No, I do not want to attend your Mario Brothers birthday party and play Princess Toadstool.

Then I had to read over the program for Red Hot Hockey, the BU-Cornell hockey game that is being played at Madison Square Garden in late November (which, shameless self-promotion here, I did the player profile pages for) which includes many gratuitous mentions of Chris Drury and Gilroy both being former BU players, both being Hobey Baker winners, both playing for the Rangers, and being from the Tri-State area. Fine. I get it. They’re both good stories. Learning-to-read fiction material for 6-8 year old Canadian boys. Whatever, Rangers. Just let me be.

Then, Jason Lawrence gets a tryout contract with the ECHL’s Charlotte Checkers. (Yes, this blog has been in denial since the Providence Bruins released him, thus why it has taken me weeks to mention this fact.) On the Checkers are two other BU alums, Kenny Roche and Kevin Schaeffer, and Hockey East and Austin Prep (my adopted New England high school) alum Chris Capraro, and Rochester boy and former Michigan goaltender Billy Sauer. Fine, Checkers. Load up on six-degrees-of-Kat players. I don’t have a favorite ECHL team, so you just won the non-existant competition to be mine.

In researching my new favorite ECHL team, I looked up their AHL and NHL team affiliations. Not all teams have them, and some teams have multiple ones. The educated guess would be that a team located in Charlotte, North Carolina might be associated with the Carolina Hurricanes. But no.  That’s when I realized my several month long resistance was frutiless.

The Checkers are affiliated with…the New York Rangers. And now, whenever they aren’t playing the Boston Bruins, I might just have to root for a New York team. Might being the operative word.