The long national nightmare is over, the New York Rangers have finally won a game at home. The Rangers were fairly sloppy, but when you are as snake bitten as the Rangers have been, who cares? A win on home ice will do wonders for this group. Now instead of questions regarding results on home ice, they can now shift to other matters on the team in the day-to-day operation.
Vincent Trocheck was missed way more than many of us could have imagined. His line with Alexis Lafreniere and Artemi Panarin had an absolutely stellar hockey game. These nights have not been prevalent this season, and hopefully with the new blood in Gabe Perreault joining Trocheck in the lineup may the team now go on a run?
Lafreniere has been locked in of late with 3 points, a power play goal, and a fly-by screen on the Vlad Gavirkov goal. I think it was pretty clear that both Lafreniere and Panarin were genuinely missing Trocheck. The line created all sorts of chances across the low to high danger spectrum and made Nashville pay for some miscues with the puck. This line in particular needed some confidence in seeing the puck finally go in the net.
The officiating last night was pretty rough, gifting Nashville some power plays that skewed some of the shots on goal numbers. The Rangers weren’t pretty, but some of those calls were egregious. Still, the Rangers persevered and held onto their lead. Sometimes you need a sloppy win, even with six goals, so you can review the tape on a win to improve, and not scramble in a desperate move for a win.
Despite the overall tone of the game, the Rangers were still excellent in their own zone in front of Igor Shesterkin. Two of the goals against were total flukes by Matthew Wood, both on the power play as mentioned above, and his third was just a weird breakdown in coverage because Lafreniere got tripped up behind the net. Even though the game was pretty much over by then, that third one was weird. It’s possible the Rangers thought the refs were going to blow the whistle because Lafreniere was face down on the ice, but that just brings us back to the officiating point.
Back to the positives, Gabe Perreault is going to do wonders for this team in the long run. His first NHL point on Lafreniere’s powerplay goal was nice and he did not look out of place, showing that creativity on offense the Rangers sorely missed. Perreault was also a quarter-inch away from his first NHL goal and made some terrific plays on the line with Mika Zibanejad and JT Miller.
Once that line develops even more chemistry, it’s hard not to imagine how good that line can be. It’s funny, we were expecting this to come in December after Perreault got his game under him in Hartford, but he played himself onto the NHL roster and showed he belonged.
It’s way too early to celebrate that the Rangers are back after one blowout win over a bad team. The key is consistency. Let’s see if a fully healthy lineup with players in the right roles was truly the missing piece.
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