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No Surprise Here
by Patrick Hoffman on 10/03/08 at 08:00 PM ET
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He may not be “The Captain” like Mark Messier was and he may not be as offensively prolific as Jaromir Jagr was but there is no doubt that Chris Drury is a valuable leader.
It came as no surprise that the New York Rangers named Chris Drury as the team’s 25th captain tonight while at a team dinner in Prague. According to Sam Weinman of The Journal News, Drury is honored and excited to be leading this team moving forward.
“I was just thrilled. I was just excited, very honored,” Drury said on a conference call with the team’s beat reporters. “To be a captain anywhere in the NHL is a thrill. To do it with the Rangers, a team I grew up cheering for, going to games at the Garden, it’s hard to put into words.”
This is not the first time that Drury has been a captain as he was the co-captain of the Buffalo Sabres with Daniel Briere during the 2006-07 season, when the Sabres won the President’s Trophy as the league’s best team.
As I mentioned in a previous blog, this is a player who may not say a lot but instead leads by example. A perfect example of this could be seen on Wednesday when the Rangers took on Metallurg Magnitogorsk. The team was down 3-1 late in the second period and not only did Drury score the first goal to get the team going, but he also scored the tying goal. If that’s not clutch, I don’t know what is.
This is a player who will play hard every shift, sacrifice his body, play on the power play, kill penalties and more importantly, produce when it matters most. Again, he may not be a Messier or a Jagr but the Rangers don’t need him to be.
For the Rangers to be successful, he just needs to be Drury.
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About Goal Line Report
The Goal Line Report will focus on all things Eastern Conference. Do I have a bias towards the Eastern Conference just because I am a New Yorker? No, but it certainly does make things easier! I’ll make my opinions known on Eastern Conference news bits (as often as I can), big games, hot and cold players, trades (I don’t make things up) and anything and everything else related to the Eastern Conference that I think is important for hockey fans to know. I will, in every sense of the word, be the beast of the East while also making sure to drop my thoughts on other hockey news items.
I, Patrick Hoffman, have covered the NHL since 2003 and have worked for a variety of hockey media sources including: Stan Fischler, Spector’s Hockey, TheHockeyNews.com, HockeyBuzz.com, McKeen’s Hockey, Blueshirt Bulletin, XM Home Ice Channel Hockey Blog, HockeyPrimeTime.com, FantasyHockey.com. NY SportsDay, and HokejaVestnesis.com.
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