Inside the friendship that could define David Quinn’s first season

Of course Kevin Shattenkirk remembered the day that David Quinn scratched him as a player for the AHL Lake Erie Monsters, and of course the current Rangers defenseman brought it up when his longtime friend was hired to be the 35th coach in Blueshirts history.

“I got scratched, and it was a moment where it was my first year playing pro, and I thought I was a first-round draft pick and it’s only a matter of time [to get called up],” Shattenkirk told The Post in a rare quiet moment during Quinn’s introductory press conference at the Garden on Thursday. “I’m in the minors, I’m going to get called up no matter what. I didn’t play well for a long stretch and he benched me, he put me in the stands. That was an eye-opening experience for me. That’s something that he is going to carry into this job. He demands that you work hard every day. I think if you do that, he’s very fair to you and treats you well.”

That seemed to be one of the main themes for Quinn, that he is going to be a very demanding, hands-on coach, in stark contrast to his predecessor, Alain Vigneault. And Quinn, who will turn 52 in July, is also going to lean on Shattenkirk quite a bit to get the pulse of the team.

That is a role that the 29-year-old Shattenkirk is going to embrace after a disappointing first season playing for his hometown team, where he signed as a free agent this past summer for a market discount on a four-year, $26.6 million deal with an annual salary-cap hit of $6.65 million. He then hurt his left knee in training camp and struggled to play through it before deciding on what became season-ending surgery in January.

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The Rangers then began their rebuild in earnest in February, trading away a bunch of veterans for young prospects and draft picks, eventually missing the playoffs for the first time since 2010. It wasn’t easy for Shattenkirk to watch, but it did reboot the organization that now seems to have a renewed vigor.

“I think my drive for this season is everything that went wrong last season, both on a team level and on an individual level; putting something out there so people can really see who I am as a player,” Shattenkirk said. “And then, now having a coach who really demands a lot of me and always has, it’s just another person I don’t want to let down. And for me, I like that, I feed off that kind of drive.”

The relationship between Shattenkirk and Quinn goes back over a decade, when Quinn recruited the teenage defenseman out of New Rochelle to come to Boston University for his freshman year in 2007-08. Back then, Quinn was an assistant coach and ran the defensemen under the legendary Jack Parker.

Shattenkirk had been drafted No. 14 overall by the Avalanche in 2007 — much like Quinn, also a defenseman, who had been drafted No. 13 overall by the North Stars in 1984 before having to give up his playing career due to Christmas disease, a hemophiliac condition. After three years at BU, Shattenkirk turned pro, and who was there to greet him at AHL Lake Erie but Quinn, who had left college to try his hand as a head coach in the pro ranks.

And that’s when Shattenkirk got scratched, a reminder that Quinn was going to hold every player accountable, no matter their history.

“He’s good at getting to know his player and getting to know how to push buttons,” Shattenkirk said. “He knows how to do that with me already. He’s going to be hard on me and I know that. I remember what that was like.”

Now Quinn has a monumental task in front of him, trying to help rebuild the Rangers on the fly. With all of his prior relationships, from general manger Jeff Gorton to assistant GM Chris Drury, the one that might prove most important during the season might be with Shattenkirk.

They will have to put the pure friendship aside and reestablish the player-coach dynamic, and that could have quite a bit to do with how Quinn does in his first year on Broadway.

“I think hopefully I’m someone he can lean on as a leader of the team, get a pulse of the team and what we might need during the season,” Shattenkirk said. “But other than that, I think it’s back to business, and that’s the way we have to treat it.”