Enigmatic: mysterious, cryptic
Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th century masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, might be the world’s most famous painting – in part, because of that enigmatic smile.
“This ambiguity makes the viewer uncertain about her true emotions and inner thoughts,” says Illuminate.com. “If you look directly, she doesn’t seem to be carrying that joy. But if you look away, her smile returns. This is due to the use of soft shadows on the edges of her lips, creating a sense of chuckling as if she raised her cheeks.”
New York hockey media had a similar quizzical reaction to Lane Lambert. Before being hired in May as Seattle Kraken coach, Lambert spent 124 apparently inscrutable games behind the Islanders bench from 2022-24.
“Hey Lane! Show A Little Fire!” That was Newsday’s all-caps headine of unsolicited advice. “Lambert communicates well with his players, and knows his X’s and O’s. But it might help,” wrote Andrew Gross, “if the fan base actually got to know Lambert.
“We are told how personable Lambert is with his players, how his energy and emotion are contagious. We are told how well he motivates and how detailed he is, how he seems to know the right things to say when things are going wrong. But Lambert keeps any fire or personality behind closed doors. His public persona is decidedly – purposefully – vanilla.”
On what’s known as exit interview day after the 2022-23 season, the coach wasn’t around to be interviewed. Newsday’s Gross wrote, “Lambert finished the way he started, by revealing little. Asked for a look behind the curtains into his first season as an NHL head coach, he instead shut them. That’s not a new public persona for him. Media in Detroit who covered Lambert in the mid-1980s when he broke into the NHL with the Red Wings recalled him as a reticent talker.”
We’re a little late to interview Lisa del Giocondo, believed to be the woman who sat for Da Vinci’s portrait. But at our urging, as you’ll see in this video clip, the new Kraken coach did something he says never once happened during Islanders press conferences. Watch until the end of the one-minute clip to see it.