Sift through the list of defensemen the Rangers have tried on the power-play point since Brian Leetch and Sergei Zubov teamed up in the glory season of 1993-94 and the one thereafter, and you’ll be knee deep in minutia for a long while.
Remember? Kevin Hatcher was once supposed to be the answer. Peter Smrek was once the flavor of the month, or maybe week-and-a-half. Max Kondratiev, part of the package obtained from Toronto for Leetch, once actually scored from the point for the Blueshirts. Rich Brennan and Jan Mertzig were two of the guys back at the top in Wayne Gretzky’s final season.
It’s been a search worthy of “America’s Got Talent.” Except, somehow, the Rangers have never quite been able to find that talent to make for a worthy power play. Bryan McCabe had the shot, but not the legs by the time he got to Broadway late in 2010-11.
And now, all these years and characters later — Did someone say, Darren Van Impe? Didn’t think so. — there is someone different, if not entirely new, on the Blueshirts’ first-unit power unit.
That would be Marc Staal, who has been used at the point intermittently throughout the first six years of his career, but never before had been designated to open a season on the first unit, as he has been by coach Alain Vigneault.
