This was the 2005 training camp, the one immediately following the lockout and cancelled 2004-05 NHL season.
The Rangers, you remember, had loaded up on veterans from the Czech Republic including Jaromir Jagr, Martin Rucinsky, Martin Straka, Michal Rozsival and Marek Malik, to take advantage of their both their chemistry and familiarity playing within the new-age rules adopted by the NHL that included elimination of the two-line offside pass.
But accompanying the veterans was a 23-year-old, 2002 eighth-round draft choice from the Czech Republic named Petr Prucha, who had an omnipresent smile on his face and a game that got him noticed in a hurry.
Prucha was a young man in a hurry, hurrying around the ice, hurrying to make an impression, hurrying to make the team.
And when Prucha did make the team, he moved into Jagr’s apartment in Manhattan, the sage winger taking the kid winger from his homeland under his wing.
Prucha had a knack for the net. He became the Rangers’ shootout secret weapon. He scored 25 goals in his first 45 games. Going into tonight’s game at the Garden against the Penguins, he has scored 34 goals in his next 167 games. And he has not even dressed in seven of the past eight games.
Prucha, 26, is on the second year of a contract in which he’s paid $1.6 million per. The Rangers are being charged $1.6 million against the salary cap to have him in street clothes, because they sure don’t seem in a hurry to either give him a chance to re-assert himself or to send him somewhere else.
Talk about wiping a smile off someone’s face.