The worst part about owning a sports car in the city, Henrik Lundqvist tells me, as we turn onto the Westside Highway in his Porsche Panamera 4S, is being in the city. “It’s absolutely useless,” he says, clicking off the radio and merging into the leftmost lane. “The streets are awful.”

Thankfully, we are heading away from Manhattan’s asphalt maze and up to the New York Rangers’ training facility, just off the Saw Mill River Parkway. The All-Star goaltender knows this winding stretch of road like the back of his puck-beaten hands.

During the season, Lundqvist is up at the facility almost every day. In that sense, although it is only August, he’s in mid-season form: having returned from an annual summer vacation in his native Sweden only six days earlier, the Rangers’ all-time leader in both wins and shutouts has already been spending large chunks of time at the facility, participating in unofficial practice sessions with a handful of equally eager teammates, like Martin St. Louis, Mats Zuccarello and Dan Boyle.

These weeks leading up to the start of training camp are meant to be downtime. On the heels of carrying the Rangers to their first Stanley Cup Finals appearance in two decades, Lundqvist knows expectations will be as high as the championship banners that hang in the Madison Square Garden rafters when the new NHL season drops its first puck. And yet: the days are just packed.

After today’s skate, Lundqvist has a photo shoot downtown and then plans to attend his buddy Roger Federer’s nighttime match at the U.S. Open. Since returning to NYC, he has already presided over a full-day hockey camp for kids at Chelsea Piers and competed in a charity tennis event, along with Edward Norton, Novak Djokovic and John McEnroe, who is also in Lundqvist’s band (Lundqvist and McEnroe both play guitar in surprisingly able pop metal band The Noise Upstairs). New York Fashion Week, where Lundqvist, a noted clothes-horse, always seems to make an appearance, starts the following week. And then there is the official kickoff event for the Henrik Lundqvist Foundation on September 15.

This is downtime? “Yeah, I have a lot going on,” he shrugs. Aside from the occasional yawn, however—a byproduct of adjusting to the time change (and a 2-year-old child adjusting to the time change)—Lundqvist seems fully refreshed after his most physically and emotionally taxing season to date, which left him face down on the ice after a double-overtime loss to the L.A. Kings.

It’s no wonder Lundqvist needed two months on the Swedish coast to clear his head and put last season into perspective. But even without the calming effects of the North Sea, the 32-year-old Lundqvist, a professed car guy, manages to find peace—and this is it, this road, this drive, cruising up the Saw Mill River Parkway.