A Torturous Revival of a Rangers Season That Should Have Remained Dead

The subtitle of local beat writer Rick Carpiniello’s latest book, Nightmare on 33rd Street (published by Albion Press, available in paperback for $18.95), is “A Long Season with the NY Rangers.” To those that remember it, it was more of a loooong season, the extra “0”s symbolizing the miserable continuation of the Rangers’ playoff drought to four straight seasons. And for anyone that chooses to join Carpiniello on his voyage to re-live all the pain and suffering of the 2000–2001 season, they’ll find it to be a loooong book as well.

Does the season that began with new management, new coaches, and the return of Mark Messier, and ended with humiliating failure and the eventual acquisition of Eric Lindros, deserve a dedicated and detailed re-telling? Perhaps. As the book jacket claims, it was a “bizarre and disastrous” season, unique in not only the level of the team’s ineptitude but also the methods by which the Rangers themselves self-destructed. On paper it should never have happened. New York was a high-priced squad of all-stars. Promises and guarantees were made. Everything seemed different. And yet nothing changed. The losing continued, the lack of concentration pervaded, and when the year disintegrated into an almost laughable series of injuries and the watershed event of the season—the relocation of Theo Fleury into a substance abuse center—the Rangers were again on the outside of the playoff picture, and not even close to looking in.

Nightmare promotes itself as an answer to what went wrong during this dismal season, but in the end the reader is left, like everyone involved with the Rangers, grasping futilely for answers, making lame excuses, and wondering, as Ron Low cleverly asks, if the coffee machine has an arsenic button.

And the unquestioned star of the book is, naturally, coach Low—fall-guy and scapegoat extraordinaire whose services were terminated at the end of the 2002 season. Carpiniello paints the embattled ex-coach as a sympathetic figure surrounded by egos, injuries, and situations that fall beyond the control of any mortal man. And the premise works—almost. By all accounts Low was (and is) a likeable guy: a quick wit, personable to the media, friendly with his players, respectful of his bosses. But he was also a questionable hiring placed in an awkward position where failure was not an option. Fans were restless. Sweeping changes had been made. The Rangers were a proud organization reduced to a joke; they were a high-payroll bust that lacked identity, character and, above all, leadership. And Ron Low, a coach with a losing record to begin with, was being asked to lead them. It was a recipe for disaster from the get-go.

But it’s only fair to make those assessments in retrospect. Carpiniello didn’t have such luxuries. What he had was a struggling coach treading water through personality clashes, ACL tears, substance abuse crises, and an inexplicable string of baffling loses. What he had was an amiable man fighting to keep the smile on his face. If the hiring itself indicated anything, it proved Ron Low to be a nice (and funny) man who, as Carpiniello describes him, seemingly only needed a break. He got none in his first year in New York. Was Low to blame for the problems of the team? Carpiniello didn’t seem to think so. So who was to blame? That’s the problem, and therein lies the fundamental flaw with the book.

The promotional quote from Damian Cristodero of the St. Petersburg Times describes the book as, “A revealing tale of how an expensive team bankrupted a season.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The bulk of the text, seemingly recycled from Carpiniello’s column in The Journal News, is nothing more than game-by-game recaps and box score summaries from the 2000-2001 season. The insights are less the product of media privilege and a well-developed knowledge of the game but (unfortunately) more of an obvious critique available to anyone with a short-wave radio or a rabbit-eared black-and-white TV. Unless you find it revealing to blame the loss of an entire season on a missed assignment by Petr Nedved or a blown scoring chance by Radek Dvorak, you’ll be disappointed by what the book offers as insight into the befuddling collapse of promising franchise. Unless you think that the entire season came down the post Brian Leetch hit on February 5, you’re bound to be disappointed by Carpiniello’s book.

Sure, there are insights—the wit of coach Low, the poise of Mark Messier, the moronic playfulness of Michel Grosek—but these moments are all too brief and undersupplied. Carpiniello, perhaps loyal to his integrity as a beat journalist and respectful of the players he interacts with every day, only remotely touches on anything “behind the scenes,” and his personal speculations are kept to a minimum. This style arguable flies in a 500 word column, but it ultimately becomes tiresome in an almost 400 page book. And then there are the typos. Oh, the typos. Almost one a page: misspellings, transposed words, misplaced characters—enough mistakes of grammar to make you wonder if the author even cared about his final product. Several black-and-white illustrations are included, none of which add to the narrative or do much to inspire the book. All in all, a weak collaboration between the author and publisher.

And then there’s Carpiniello himself, or rather his opinion. Highly critical of Glen Sather and his pursuit of Eric Lindros over Jaromir Jagr, Carpiniello (again in retrospect) almost embarrasses himself in his narrow-mindedness of the benefits of obtaining one former MVP over another—one available for blue-chip prospects and the other for expendable cogs in an otherwise broken machine. Some sections almost make you cringe:

"And if there is one player on this planet for whom you include [Pavel] Brendl, it is Jagr, despite his baggage. Jagr automatically gets the Rangers into the playoffs. Jagr, at 29, is still here when they are ready again. So why not?

Guaranteed, Jagr would be a Ranger today if [Neil] Smith was still the GM, or if Dave Checketts was running the Garden. They understood this isn’t Edmonton.”

Yikes. Not exactly words to close a book by.

Nightmare on 33rd Street is a bland and somewhat boring recount of a season best forgotten by fans, players, coaches, trainers, zamboni drivers, snow shovelers, organ mashers, popcorn vendors, ticket tearers, and anyone else associated with the 2000-2001 New York Rangers. Reporters like Carpiniello apparently feel otherwise. His drab style and somewhat lazy narrative all but overshadow any kind of insight or wisdom that might interest the average hockey fan, and the numerous typographical errors and jarring lack of NHL intuition make the book a troublesome task to finish. On the plus side, it reads quick, so if you find yourself trapped on a nice stretch of beach and are jonesing for some hockey, Nightmare might just quench your thirst.

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