DENVER – Theo Fleury is told that Brian Leetch thinks that Manhattan is a wonderful place in which to live and play hockey. “I’m sure he does, and I’m sure for him it is,” Fleury says, laughing.
He is told that the Rangers are dying, absolutely dying, for the NHL’s Little Big Man to get to July 1 unsigned, accept an obscene amount of Cablevision money and then find out for himself.
“I know,” he says. “But …
“I’m not really thinking about that at all.”
The exchange took place before Colorado’s 3-0 loss to Dallas in Game 3 of the Western Finals. Fleury was thinking about how much he loves the Denver environment, so similar to the Calgary one in which he played for his first 11 years in the NHL. Fleury was thinking about how much he loves playing for the Avalanche, a team so dissimilar to both the one he left behind in February and the one for which Leetch plays.
“Coming here has been a breath of fresh air to me; it’s given me a new life and a new opportunity,” No. 14 was saying just before a team meeting. “The last few years were very, very tough, being in a situation where you’d have to play your very, very best to even have a chance to win, where if you didn’t score, you knew that your team probably wasn’t going to be able to win.
“But here, on this team, there are so many great players, the focus for all of us is simply working within the system. I don’t come to the rink feeling that the entire burden is on me to produce. They brought me here hoping that I would be the last piece of the puzzle, and it’s worked out well for everyone.
“It’s everything I thought it would be when I came here,” he said. “This is where I want to be. Hockey’s fun for me again.”
Fleury won’t celebrate his 31st birthday until June 29. Had Mrs. Fleury given birth two days later in 1968, her son would not have been eligible for unrestricted free agency until next year, so no one can say that Theo doesn’t understand that timing is everything.
This also comes from experiencing a hockey career that began as a rookie in 1989 with a Stanley Cup, then continued for the next nine years without so much as a single playoff round victory.
“It was almost unbelievable, because we had some great teams there that lost; some great teams,” Fleury said. “At the beginning, the losses were almost unendurable, but then you realize that anything can happen in playoff hockey, and that you can only control how well you, yourself, play, and that it’s a team game.
“Individual success is fine, but if you’re playing to win the Stanley Cup, which is the reason we’re all here, then you’re only as good as your teammates.”
Fleury, held scoreless last night, now finds his team down 2-1 against the Stars.
“Again, there’s no undue pressure here on me to score, and so I don’t put pressure on myself that way,” said Fleury, who has scored 40-or-more goals four times in his career, getting 51 in 1990-91. “I’ve been through too much in that regard to begin worrying about personal statistics. One thing I’ve learned is that when you start to press like that, it’s like banging our head against the wall.
“The focus here is on the team. I don’t need to score every night. I just need to win. You get to a point in your career where you’re willing to sacrifice almost everything to be on a team that can win the Stanley Cup.
“This team knows it’s going to win. It’s not a matter of hoping or thinking it might. It knows. This is the kind of team I want to play for.”
In other words, Manhattan can wait.