Hockeybird.com: Tuning In Tonight....

Tuning In Tonight....

Wednesday - February 12, 2003

Yeah, we'll all be watching. Alex makes his debut with the Rangers tonight vs. the Panthers. I'm really looking forward to tonight's game......I could really use a win. Not so much for the Rangers playoff hopes.....more for my own mental stability. It's a 7:30 start.

(Note: As of now [11:30am], tonight's game is still on the Metro Channel, not MSG. I say "as of now" because last season when the Rangers got Bure, Cablevision switched the game to MSG at the last minute. Let's hope that happens again as everyone in the NYC area without Metro will be shut out of Kovalev's return, a very sizeable population including yours truly. - Rocha)

Brian Leeds writes his "Obligatory Alexei Kovalev Article" and we are happy to publish it.

Fact or Fiction also has some new words to read......Gabe looks at the finances.

Newsday - "I never said that I wanted to trade [Blackburn], someone else did," Sather said. "I'm not willing to trade any 19-year-old guy that's a great prospect. We've kept all our prospects...I could have traded [junior defenseman] Fedor Tjutin 100 times this year. But I don't see us getting any farther down the road if we move all those kind of players."

Newsday again - "He's not going to be the savior," Holik said yesterday. "He's no savior. We can't think that way. We can't allow ourselves to think that way. It takes more than one player to turn a team around today. He brings us a top winger, if not the top winger in the league, but he's not a savior."

Daily News - "As far as a person, I'm the same," he said. "But I guess, over the years, I've learned a lot. It was a great opportunity to play with Jaromir and Mario. They're definitely guys you can learn from."

Daily News again - But unless Pavel Bure and Brian Leetch experience dramatic improvement in their achy joints, neither will rejoin the lineup for Alexei Kovalev's second Rangers debut tonight against the Florida Panthers.

Post - "I don't think it will take a long time to get used to playing with Petr," said Kovalev, who arrived at his Mamaroneck home at 2:30 am Tuesday after driving through the night from Pittsburgh with Janne Laukkanen. "It's not right to compare now to when we played before. Everything is different. The atmosphere is different; I'm different."

More Post - "I find it really exasperating that people don't recognize what they're seeing," the GM and coach said yesterday. "We don't have three guys chasing the puck, we don't have two defensemen pinching. We're playing the same system as every other team, but we have a record at this point that we're not one of the better teams at executing it."

NY Times - "I try to be a little more aggressive," said Kovalev, who is fourth in the National Hockey League in points with 64 (27 goals, 37 assists). "I'm not trying to beat the same guy twice, like everybody thinks I tried to do here. And I've started shooting the puck a lot more when I get into position."