The good news is the Rangers finally scored a goal on home ice. A beautiful passing play by Mika Zibanejad to Artemi Panarin after a strong forecheck from Will Cuylle finally broke their cold streak on Garden ice. The assist put Mika Zibanejad in the top 10 all time in Rangers history in assists with 341. The bad news is that was about it last night. This was easily the ugliest game since the opener, with missed passes, timid shooting, bad team defense, and a greedy goalie pull and you have yourself a 3-1 loss on home ice.
As brought up during the broadcast 1st intermission, the Minnesota Wild had 39 shot attempts in the first period alone while the Rangers were only able to muster up 12 attempts themselves. This is not a knock on Minnesota, they should be a playoff team come April and have plenty of depth, but they were missing some of their weapons and the Rangers couldn’t capitalize.
It’s the storyline that has been said virtually every recap, this team lives and dies with it’s top six. Unfortunately, half of that top six can’t hit water if they fell out of a boat thus far. Will Cuylle, Alexis Lafreniere, and Conor Sheary are just not up to snuff right now, and that is a major red flag when discussing Lafreniere in particular. The hope is obviously that things return to normal when Vincent Trocheck comes off of LTIR, but in the interim, the options are just really slim on line combinations that can actually produce goals.
Carson Soucy made his return, coming off of the IR after sustaining the upper body injury a weekend ago in Pittsburgh. With his return, Scott Morrow was sent back down to Hartford, Urho Vaakanainen was a healthy scratch, and Matthew Robertson continued to be paired with Will Borgen.
That said, Soucy didn’t really look strong out there. The defense is going to continue to be a talking point because the Rangers just do not have the horses on the blue line to consistently make key offensive plays. Yes, that’s part of the position, moving the puck up the ice. Other than Adam Fox, no one on the Rangers blue line can do this consistently, and it’s a major problem at the moment.
With the complete understanding that you cannot rush the prospects otherwise you risk long term consequences, does anyone else get a feeling that there is just zero juice with this team right now? Watching Rangers hockey over the last 4 years was frustrating, but it was also fun (last year not included). With the current construction of the team, it’s been a tough watch since the puck dropped.
The Rangers are 3-4-1 out of the gate. If this were a bad stretch in January, it’d be one thing, but I don’t think this is the kind of start Drury, Sullivan, or even the players wanted. With very little cap flexibility, the current players have to figure this out and start to get some wins. With the Sharks coming Thursday to MSG and a Western Canada road trip that goes into next week, time will tell if the team has the guts and the will to take things up a notch.
Who are the real Rangers this season? Are they the players we saw up in Montreal, who were able to stick to the game plan and fight back? Or are they more of what we saw last night as a one-line, one-pairing team? It’s only the 8th game, but you do wonder how much longer this goes on before tinkering is done?
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