I can promise you the Rangers won’t believe their problem is behind the head coach’s couch. No one in the team hierarchy wants to point the finger at David Quinn. Nobody wants to have to make a coaching change.
But games like this, in which the Blueshirts took a full pratfall on the Garden ice by losing 5-2 to a Devils team that hadn’t played a game since January 31 and only had one practice to prepare. … Well, games like this one can force club president John Davidson to ask some focused questions about what the hell is going on here?
Boy, oh boy, oh boy. This was so smelly.
After a match in which the Devils held the first and third periods, ditching it with three goals in the last 20 minutes to break up a 2-2 game, Mika Zibanejad and Chris Kreider – some of the biggest culprits in the team. 4-7-3 escape – no words at all.
“We lacked a bit of despair to be honest,” said Zibanejad, last year’s 41 goalscorer who was tied to one eleven games in a row. “We didn’t get to the level we needed throughout the game.
“We have to find a way to make it happen.”
The Rangers have either been in the lead or endured two periods in 11 of their 14 games. Yet they have only won four times. It’s not enough to suggest that Zibanejad’s terrible start or that Kreider’s negligible impact is largely the cause of what’s ailing the team, although few clubs can overcome the lack of productivity with their greatest weapons.
No, there is more. The Rangers, who won 18 of the 26 immediately after Igor Shesterkin’s promotion to Broadway last January, have forgotten how to win. It’s more than the second-worst five-on-five shoot rate in the NHL. Or maybe there is just less than meets the eye.
Quinn, who came across as gloomy with the media during his post-game Zoom call, as he did during the more than two years of his tenure, was asked if this was an effort.
“Um, yeah,” he said, looking as defeated as his team.
If a team loses because of effort, should at least part of the team bounce back on the coach? I’ll answer that: Uh, yes.
All the improvements in the defensive zone – well, not during these last 20 minutes when the Blueshirts went without the injured Jacob Trouba – don’t seem to be a hill of beans compared to the problems this club seems to be facing.
“For most of the game they outdid us, outdone us, outsmarted us and won the majority of the battles,” said Kreider. “I mean, the odds aside, we got away from the things we did well.”
This is the money quote from Kid K: “They just wanted it more. It is unacceptable. “
The Rangers had not been undone by the power play. For the first time this year, they haven’t even taken a single man advantage. They dominated much of the second period when the trio Ryan Strome-Kaapo Kakko-Alexis Lafreniere held the puck under the hash marks, but made no mistakes.
Hey you know what? Kreider has not taken a single penalty this season while taking six, including a stoppage in the first period. And Zibanejad pulled exactly one while grabbing five, including a second period elbow he competed for and was in the box for Pavel Zacha’s power play goal.
Again, these are the individual trees through which the forest may not be visible. The only reason the Rangers were even in the game in the second game was because Shesterkin was out in the opening 20-minute period in 2019-20. OK, Artemi Panarin was sidelined for the second game in a row, but that doesn’t even come close to explaining the club’s ailments.
“A lot of things happened tonight, you wonder why,” said Quinn, whose job it is not to wonder but to provide solutions. “For me, we’re in a situation where we haven’t gained very much, you know. We need to understand the difference between winning and losing and what you need to do that. “
Quinn gets calls on social media all the time for failing to develop children. That’s a ball of malarkey. Kakko – arguably the club’s best in this club, and that’s not meant to be silly praise – has made dramatic progress in the past two weeks. Adam Fox, Ryan Lindgren and K’Andre Miller speak for themselves. Pavel Buchnevich, tweaked by the coach prior to the game, responded. His game has improved by leaps and bounds for Quinn. Lafreniere? No, I don’t think the coach is responsible for number 1’s one-goal and one-point output.
But a game like this … well, when the bus goes off course, everyone looks at the driver. The Rangers don’t want to look at the coach, but that might be easier said than done.