A former Senator dominates the Winter Classic with a historic hat trick and sparks a "what if" for Ottawa fans.
The New Year is off to an excellent start for former Ottawa Senator Mika Zibanejad.
On Friday morning, Zibanejad was named to Sweden's Olympic team next month, joining the likes of Erik Karlsson and Filip Gustavsson, who also used to wear the Centurion crest.
Then on Friday night, Zibanejad became the first man to score a hat trick at an NHL Winter Classic, helping the New York Rangers pound the Florida Panthers 5-1 at loanDepot park in Miami. Zibanejad was in on all the scoring, registering a five-point night, which was also a WC first.
"I think it's hard to grasp the whole day like that, but yeah, it's been a great 12, 16 hours. It's been a fun day," Zibanejad told the media after the game.
With the game being played in Florida, six kilometres away from a beach, it certainly wasn't the chilliest of Winter Classics, but hot or cold, there's something the Rangers love above the great outdoors. While "Miami Mika" hasn't been around for all of them, the New Yorkers are now 6-0-0 in games outside.
Zibanejad now has 35 points in 42 games this season, and when a former Senator has a day like that, it's easy for Sens fans to wonder, 'How did we let that guy get away?'
Zibanejad was Ottawa's first-round pick, sixth overall in the 2011 NHL Draft, and while he was good in his early years in the capital, he was still young and developing. In his first two full seasons, he hovered near a 40-point pace. The next two improved to 46 and 51, and every season was becoming a little more productive than the last.
In July 2016, in his second month as the Senators' new GM, Pierre Dorion traded Zibanejad and a second-round pick to the Rangers for centre Derick Brassard and a seventh-round pick. The young Swede was still only 23 and was due for a big raise in 2017, while Brassard's front-loaded deal meant that, in actual salary, he was only owed $3.4 million over the final two years of the deal.
Just as he was in Ottawa, Zibanejad's first two years on Broadway remained solid, but not yet elite. Those stats arrived in year three, touching off an excellent career where he's put up 624 in 691 games over a decade in New York.
When Zibanejad gets back from Italy, he'll also be hitting the 1000-game mark for his career, which would certainly be filed in Ottawa's bloated file folder marked "The Ones That Got Away."
Meanwhile, after a day to remember on Friday, Zibanejad sat in on the NHL on TNT broadcast as fake Miami snow gently fell on his head. As the game MVP, he was presented with a gaudy Winter Classic necklace with a massive pendant by his former teammate and countryman, Henrik Lundqvist.
By Steve Warne
The Hockey News Ottawa
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