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FeedTim Kennedy gts a second chance
You can't help feeling excited for Tim Kennedy. Not because he's the hometown kid who got a raw deal from the hometown team—we've all heard that worn-out, woe-is-me song played and played again like Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls" was in July 2007.
So I won't rehash it, but suffice it to say, the Sabres brass didn't think Kennedy was good enough to make the opening-night roster, didn't want to pay him to shuttle between Portland and Buffalo, and made a cold, hard business decision based on those factors. It's futile to over-analyze it.
But now, with the $550,000 one-way deal he signed with the New York Rangers on Monday, Kennedy will get a second chance with another NHL club.
Yes, my July blog about Kennedy's unceremonious exit from Buffalo would have you believe I'm an unsympathetic, insensitive jerk (Hey, who just said "Amen"?). Understand, I like the guy, I really do. But for whatever reason it didn't work out in Buffalo, salary-cap and personnel issues conspiring against both sides. I don't necessarily agree with the organization's decision, and Lord knows they handled it as well as a Manila S.W.A.T. team.
But I understand the move and, more to the point, we're ultimately powerless to do anything about it. Like the Iraqi security forces, you just have to believe the Sabres know what they're doing, despite your gut feeling otherwise, and watch as they put their best boot forward.
So we're now left hoping Kennedy makes good on his clean slate in the Big Apple. He'll have a decent shot at making an impact there and stands a much better chance at sticking in the Blueshirts' lineup than on the Sabres' top three lines.
New York, thanks to a legacy of foolish spending and personnel bungling, offers opportunities aplenty. Despite any of his shortcomings, would Kennedy be a downgrade under Erik Christensen and Artem Animisov, whom the Hockey News have listed as the top two pivots on the Rangers' shaky depth chart? There's Chris Drury, of course, but he's been a massive disappointment on Broadway and can't handle centering the top line with snipers Marian Gaborik and Alexander Frolov.
Neither can Kennedy, you might say. You'd probably be right, but I can say this with certainty: Kennedy's no floater. He works hard and scraps, and even when he looked nowhere near NHL-worthy for brutally long stretches last season, he never took shifts off or shyed away from hits and high-traffic areas. Take the boy out of South Buffalo, but you can't take the South Buffalo out of the boy.
I think he'll respond well to a hard-ass like John Tortorella, and you get the feeling Torts will find a way to get Kennedy on the ice when he sees a driver stick out among a pack of passengers.
And if Kennedy gets shifted to wing, perhaps he could work on the Rangers' periolously shallow right side, where, after Gaborik and Rochester native Ryan Callahan the Rangers have a bunch of unproven kids and Derek Boogaard, whose name, in Swedish, roughly translates to "Paul Kruse."
It's been a forgettable summer for Kennedy, but after being fed into the grinder of the hockey "business," you can bet he'll never take a spot on anyone's roster for granted, and will be absolutely raving and drooling to prove he belongs, not only in Rangers' camp this month, but also in the years beyond.
Kennedy's obviously not the be-all, end-all solution to what ails the Rangers. But he's definitely not going to the problem and, unlike many of his new teammates, will be working to earn every cent of his paycheck—not to mention prove his detractors, myself included, dead wrong.
