November ticks into December, and things start getting better. His grandmother always told him living well is the best revenge. If that applies to playing well, then David has found his revenge. The Panthers still seem to be employing their ‘We’ll go down but we’ll destroy your goalie’s GAA while we do it’ strategy, rarely pulling a win out of the mess, but the Islanders have gotten tighter, cleaner. They’re still on the wrong side of playoff berth, and David’s pretty sure that’s where they’re going to sit all season, but if you compare them to a team like the Panthers, they come out looking good.
Knutsen’s less likely to melt down after a bad goal than he was a month ago, everyone has gotten acclimated to one another well enough to start passing better, and the checking line is leaving players in smears against the boards, which tends to negatively impact their opponent’s offence. They’re not a good team — they’re not a good team by a long-shot — but at least they’re getting better.
They’re all playing decent or better hockey out there. David is no exception, is instead generally held up as the exemplar, his point total slowly ticking back up to a point per game average. They’ve played a stretch of mediocre and bad teams, and David has no illusions that he’ll perform at this level when they head west for a backbreaking road trip after the Christmas break, that any of them will.
Still, it feels good in the moment, and better because he’s creeping up to Lourdes in the standings. Lourdes’ points production is dropping, victim to frequent line-changes, maybe, David doesn’t care, is just glad it’s down. The media’s dropped their constant comparisons as well, a little less interested in Lourdes when he isn’t performing, a little more interested in David’s actual merits because he is performing, and they’ve almost shut up about the supposed rivalry when the Panthers host the Islanders almost a month to the day since their last meeting.
It’s the Islanders’ second game in two days, but the team seems to feel good coming into it after coming out on top of a formidable Tampa in a close game the night before. Being in the Sunshine State is raising the team’s spirits all by itself, and even David isn’t immune to it. He takes a walk outside the hotel in the heat, baseball hat on just to shield his face from the glare rather than to mask his identity. It’s not like he’s going to get recognised here, not like the game in Ottawa a week ago, where he’d gotten a hometown salute and a mob of pretty girls in down coats waiting for him after practice, like he was a member of the home team. It was flattering, but it was weird too, and he prefers this, looking like any other winter-pale tourist soaking in the sun.
The Islanders are varying degrees of sun-stupid when they gather for a quick practice, more a pre-warm up than anything else, because they don’t want to wear their legs out. They’re accordingly varying degrees of slow and lackadaisical, and maybe David should have taken that as a bad omen, but he didn’t.