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| It's been lonely days for Rick DiPietro ever since he signed that absurd contract years ago. (Credits: Bruce Bennett/Getty Images) |
It’s hard to feel bad for a guy who makes $4.5 million a year and comes home to this every night…so we don’t. It’s also hard to feel bad for a team that hands an injury-prone goaltender a 15-year contract, so we won’t waste our pity on them either. But when thinking about Rick DiPietro, the subsidizer of New York area doctors, and the New York Islanders, the subsidizers of Rick DiPietro, a sense of hollow disappointment inevitably creeps up.
DiPietro represents a lack of fulfillment. If an author sat down to write a novel, crafted an alluring beginning, a gripping middle, and then stopped writing just when the story was hitting its stride, we would have the book-incarnation of DiPietro. The author might have tried to resurrect his story, adding the sporadic chapter here, the blotchy page there, but it was never the same.
The latest page in DiPietro’s book, which is now for sale on the dusty racks of the AHL, came Friday night in Hartford, CT against the Connecticut Whale. After being waived by the Islanders a week prior, which made DiPietro feel as though “they ripped my heart out, stabbed it, set it on fire and flushed it down the toilet”, the outspoken netminder reported to Bridgeport to “play a lot of games and get sharp.”
(Uniondale, NY to Bridgeport, CT? Okay, now we feel a little bad for him.)
But the change of scenery did not bring about the desired results. After 20 minutes of hockey, DiPietro had given up 5 goals on 12 shots. He got scored on from close, from far, and just about everywhere in between, even picking up an assist on the Whale’s fifth goal on a goalie-doing-too-much-behind-the-net disaster. When the Sound Tigers came back out for the second period, DiPietro had reclaimed his now-familiar spot at the end of the bench.
So much for playing a lot of games.
The move by the Islanders was the right one. In 3 NHL starts this year, DiPietro is 0-3, with a goals against average north of 4 and a save percentage south of .900. Way south. He has given up goals like this one and been drained in chants like this one. (The organist, upon realizing what he is encouraging from the crowd, quickly changes his tune. At least one person in Nassau still has DiPietro’s back.)
But those virulent lyrics from the hometown crowd, drenched in bitterness and contempt, are a stark reminder of how far this fanbase has turned on its franchise goaltender. Before DiPietro’s play deteriorated along with his body, a fan-favorite refrain in the Coliseum was “D-P! D-P!” The louts in Loudville bellowed their savior’s nickname, partly in defiant response to cheers of “Hen-reek! “Hen-reek!” echoing from Madison Square Garden, but mostly in joyful deliverance, freed as they were from the days of Garth Snow and last-place finishes in the Atlantic Division.
Oh, the irony. Snow lost more than he won on Long Island (he also picked up 68 penalty minutes in four years doing things like this), but his greatest disservice to the Islanders would come as the team’s general manager. After DiPietro’s strong 2005-06 campaign, Snow and owner Charles Wang decided they hadn’t crippled the Islanders enough with the asinine 10-year contract they handed Alexei Yashin in the 2001 offseason, and that the only way to make up for their imprudence was to be more imprudent. So they signed DiPietro for 15 years, $67.5 million, keeping him in an Islander uniform through age 40.
Even the most ardent DiPietro proponents raised their eyebrows. The then-24 year old had already undergone one arthroscopic surgery on his left knee, and he hadn’t done anything so otherworldly on Long Island as to deserve a 15-year deal. At the time the Islanders tied themselves to DiPietro, here were his career numbers: 58 wins, 62 losses, 2.85 GAA, .900 SV%. Say what you want about a solid GAA and a solid SV%, but anyone who commits $67.5 million to a career sub-.500 goaltender is asking for trouble.
Trouble is what they got. Nearing the end of another strong season in 2007, DiPietro suffered a concussion in a collision with Montreal forward Steve Begin, forcing him to miss the final seven games of the regular season. The following year, the kind of freaky things that will inevitably to teams that doll out 15-year contracts began to happen.
In December, DiPietro sprained his left knee during warmups and missed three games. Then, participating in his first NHL All-Star game, he tweaked his hip during the skills competition and later needed surgery, costing him the last nine games of the season.
Then the 2008-09 season came along, and DiPietro revolutionized the wins market. Between an arthroscopic procedure in November and left-knee swelling in January (that knee again), DiPietro played in just five games that season. The Islanders paid him $4.5 million for his 1 win. They paid him $36,000 for each save. And for each measly minute he played, DiPietro earned $17,000. The wins leader that season was Calgary’s Miikka Kiprusoff, who, on the DiPietro plan, would have earned $202 million for his efforts.
The ensuing offseason brought about the customary knee surgery, keeping DiPietro out for the first 27 games of the 2009-10 season. When he returned he held up for eight games, each stretch, lunge and split drawing nervous cringes from the crowd, before swelling in his right knee shelved him for the rest of the season. He finished the year with 2 wins at $2.25 million a piece, and 5 losses.
About now, Islanders fans had seen enough. But DiPietro was only getting started. In 2010-11 he mixed in a couple new ailments along with the usual knee swelling that landed him on the IR for three games. In January, he added a groin injury to his lengthy list of injuries, costing him five games, before fighting Brent Johnson’s fist with his face and sitting out 20 games with facial fractures. Season totals? 8 wins, 14 losses, 3.44 GAA, .886 SV%.
After feeling like he overcommitted himself the year before, DiPietro returned to press-box form in 2011-12. A puck to the mask in an October practice turned into a concussion that cost him three games. A groin tweak in a December tilt with Dallas put him back on the IR before the team announced in January that its star-crossed goalie would undergo surgery for a sports hernia and would be out for 10 weeks. DiPietro racked up 8 games played and 3 expensive wins on the season.
That brings us to 2013 and of course invites a breakdown of DiPietro’s earnings over the past seven years. Since resigning with the Islanders in 2006, DiPietro has been paid $400,000 per win. Over the past five years, that has ballooned to $4 million per win.
DiPietro recently made comments about considering suicide through these trying years on Long Island. And though he quickly clarified that he was not being serious, he certainly has the appearance of a man who has been to the brink and back.
Or maybe he’s just trying to remind Islander fans that he can still be their savior. If he can’t play like Jesus, at least he can look like him.
It should be remembered though, that DiPietro is just 31 years old. In the lifespan of an NHL goalie, he’s still relatively young. He has time to resurrect his career, and the Islanders have time to get their money’s worth.
DiPietro struggled to be the face of the franchise in Uniondale. But in 2015, the Islanders will be in Brooklyn, Evgeni Nabokov, their 37-year old starter in residence, will likely be long gone, and someone will have to man the pipes in the new arena. And maybe the Hockey Gods, who most definitely exist and who most definitely have targeted DiPietro, will relent.
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