Daniel Carcillo does what Daniel Carcillo does. The fact that he’s on his fourth team in five seasons won’t change that.
“I think everyone is familiar with what I do, and there’s really no surprises,” Carcillo said Wednesday morning after taking the ice at the United Center wearing a New York Rangers sweater. “I’m not really going to tailor my game to try to not hurt people’s feelings.”
The Rangers acquired Carcillo, who played 23 games for the Blackhawks last season, from the Los Angeles Kings on Saturday for a seventh-round draft pick. The agitator who once racked up 324 penalty minutes in just 57 games as a member of the Phoenix Coyotes had one goal, one assist and 57 penalty minutes in 26 games with the Kings.
“There are only a select few guys in the league who really have that type of security,” Carcillo said of changing teams again. “Guys like us tend to move around more often than not. L.A. was fun while it lasted, but toward the end I wasn’t playing for whatever reason, and they’ve got young guys that do the same job that I do, and obviously they have more invested in them. I was moveable, and [the Rangers] expressed to me they needed a little more grit and a little bit more energy, which is what I can do for them.”
Carcillo shrugged when asked if being back in the Eastern Conference — the most successful stint of his career came with the Philadelphia Flyers, which included facing the Hawks in the 2010 Stanley Cup Final — suited his game better than the West.
“I don’t know about the game, but it’s a lot less travel, so that’s nice,” he said. “I don’t really look at conference to conference, but the East in the past years has [had] a lot more tough guys. It seems everyone from the West came over here for whatever reason.”
