JOBU’S REFILL By Adam Hirschfeld

I haven’t had too much to say about the return of the NHL, mostly because I haven’t watched many games.

Not only are the Blue Jackets playing some of the most horrific hockey since the Charlestown Chiefs, but here in Cleveland, they rarely make an appearance on television. The Outdoor Life Network, the official cable carrier of the NHL, is somewhere in the 600s on my DirecTV dial. As a rule, I venture outside of the 200s only for Cavaliers basketball, American University basketball, or se;le;ct VH-1 specials (“Jewtastic” was fantastic).

The NHL as a whole is dreadfully hard to follow. There are far too many teams and far too many players; I have no idea who two-thirds of the players are. Take away the superstars, and that number might go higher than 80 percent. Even worse, the new economics put in place following the league’s emergence from the lockout caused nearly half of the players to change teams.

So it caught me by surprise that I found myself watching the Rangers and Flames on Tuesday night. DirecTV is running a promotion that allows subscribers to get NHL Center Ice at a reduced rate for the entire second half of the season as well as the first two rounds of the playoffs. I mention my DirecTV a lot in this space, mostly because: (a) I watch a lot of television and (b) I’m hoping someone from there will read my column and give me free stuff.

The Rangers are the team I root for, and they have been playing surprising well, occupying first or second place in their division for most of the season. This fact does not currently, but should soon begin to, scare my wife. Since she came into my life, the Rangers have yet to make the playoffs. Based on their solid start, the eight-year drought may be ending this April.

The Flames were the team picked by most sports media to represent the Western Conference in the Stanley Cup Finals. So I figured this game would be a decent measurement of the Rangers’ abilities.

My observations regarding both teams are as follows:

-It’s nice to see the real Jaromir Jagr back, you know, the one who was the best hockey player in the world in the late 1990s. The clutching and grabbing defensive style of hockey played before the lockout stifled Jagr’s creativity and took his joy out of playing. Not only has Jagr been filling up the stat sheet, but on Tuesday, almost every time the cameras got a glimpse of him, he was smiling. He put a couple of his patented spin moves on Robyn Regehr in the second period to set up a shot that made me wonder what decade it was.

-Mikka Kiprusoff is an excellent goalie, easily one of the best in the league. You can see how he led the Flames on their Stanley Cup run in 2004. However, he is a terrible puck handler; even with the new rules that limit how often and where goalies can play the puck with their sticks, Kiprusoff is going to cost his team a goal or two with those weak passes. It’s as if he approaches the puck like it’s made of glass.

-Jarome Iginla is a bad dude. In the 2^nd period, Iginla knocked Jagr flat on his butt on a questionable hit and not a single Ranger dared mess with him. And I don’t think it’s because the Rangers have chemistry issues or that they’re afraid to mix it up. Iginla is the Ben Wallace of the NHL.

-The Rangers probably benefited more than any other team from the lockout. They had to dump the salaries of a lot of useless veterans (Bobby Holik) and let some of their younger guys (Dominic Moore, Jed Ortmeyer, Petr Prucha) play. It was clear that from the second period on, the Rangers had another gear, getting all of the loose pucks and making plays left and right.

-The Rangers have done everything they can to put Jagr in a comfort zone. Martin Straka, Martin Rucinsky, and now Petr Sykora are all guys Jagr is comfortable playing with. Straka in particular was all over the nets on Tuesday, generating scoring chances and otherwise making life difficult for the Flames defensemen.

-The Flames have a lot of good hockey players, like Roman Hamrlik, Chuck Kobasew, and Tony Amonte. They may not finish with the best record in the West, but I wouldn’t want to draw them in the playoffs.

-If the Rangers get in the playoffs, Henrik Lundqvist is good enough to put them on his shoulders. Hockey is the one sport in which one player, almost always a goaltender, can take an average team and make them champions. For reference, see Patrick Roy in 1986 or Dominic Hasek in 1999 (even though his team lost. Do you think Dallas wanted any part of Hasek back when he was “The Dominator” in a Game 7?). Maybe I’m engaging in wishful thinking, but I think Lundqvist can be that goalie. Up 2-0 in the second period, the Flames took a turnover in the Rangers zone right on goal, and Lundqvist stood on his head to make a great save. He’s been doing a lot of that this year, and bettered Kiprusoff’s play on Tuesday.

-There were a lot of commercials for a Mark Messier Leadership Camp to be held in early March. I’m not sure whether Messier’s leadership skills translate into my everyday life, but I wouldn’t mind finding out how to score hot chicks like Madonna circa 1994.