When one of New York's NHL squads crosses the East River to face the other, it can be an intense night. A New-York-on-New-York matchup gets the fans riled up. This end of this season saw the Islanders fighting for the last playoff spot — but even when, as in recent years, neither team has anything else to play for, cross-town bragging rights are a valuable prize. After all, these guys have to look each other in the eye at Scores.
Well, maybe their eyes are otherwise engaged at Scores. But you take the point.
Anyway, last Tuesday (April 3), the intrametropolitan menace reached an unprecedented apogee when, according to
this report on TSN, Ranger netminder Henrik Lundqvist slashed the squeegee of New York Islanders
Ice Girl Kelli Higgins.
Lundqvist later explained to reporters that he doesn't like to leave the crease during stoppages. It mucks with his concentration. And reportedly, when Higgins
came around during one such stoppage to clean the ice (in the inimitably charming Islanders Ice Girls manner), her squeegee bumped the surly goalie's stick.
In a conversation with New York's NEWSDAY, Higgins described what happened next like this: "I don't know if he thought I did that on purpose or whatever, but he took a big windup and slashed the squeegee pretty good. It startled me a little bit. It didn't feel great, but I wouldn't say I was injured or in a ton of pain. I was shocked."
Both Lundqvist and Rangers forward Sean Avery are accused of directing impolite language at the Ice Girls, and during a later break, Higgins's colleague Chanel Benson claims a player on the Rangers' bench spat on her, hitting her in the back. Gross.
We're on record: we love the New York Islanders Ice Girls. (See this post from 2004, though all its accompanying pictures were lost in our server switch.) They've got that special Long Island brand of sassy-trashy glamour that's one of the area's very few agreeable exports. Any team that harbors the kind of insensitive goon who'd mess with these comely lasses — why, we'd have half a mind to root against them in the playoffs, if they weren't facing Atlanta. Maybe we'll root against them in the second round, if they advance.
The Isles won in a shootout, 3-2.