You raise a Cup that has been .9878 empty since 1940 to a Rangers team that has gotten off to an 8-2-1 start with most of its marquee players yet to hit high notes.
That reflects well on the club’s structure. Championship teams are always equal to more than the sum of their parts. It bodes well that the squad knows how to close out games, a skill often overlooked.
But winning consistently without expected contributions from upper-echelon athletes is probably not sustainable over the long haul of an 82-game season. Fans may root for laundry, but laundry does not win games. Players — and teams — do.
Artemi Panarin, Chris Kreider, Adam Fox and Igor Shesterkin have been the Blueshirts’ best players through Peter Laviolette’s first go-round as the team’s head coach.
And now Fox is out at least until Nov. 29 — another eight games following Tuesday’s match at the Garden against the Red Wings — with the injury he sustained on Nov. 2 on that leg-to-leg hit by Carolina’s Sebastien Aho, while Shesterkin is in a “day-to-day” mode after coming out of that same game banged-up following at least one goalmouth collision.
The challenge, thus, becomes greater for the Blueshirts, who had managed to construct the NHL’s fourth-best winning percentage at .773 despite the fact the team had gotten a sum total of zero goals at five-on-five from any of its centers entering play.
That seems impossible, doesn’t it? It’s not just the 8-2-1 part, either. It is enough that after 11 games, Mika Zibanejad, Vincent Trocheck, Filip Chytil (before he went down with a suspected concussion in that calamitous match against the ’Canes), Barclay Goodrow and Nick Bonino have not scored even one time at full and equal strength.
Zibanejad had two goals, one on a power play and one at three-on-three in overtime in blasting the one-time winner in Winnipeg off a neat feed from Panarin. Trocheck had scored once on the man-advantage. That represents the totality of the Blueshirt centers’ production.
Trap, 1-3-1, system, structure, whatever, they are all important, but the Rangers will not maintain this pace with this kind of output from their centers. Toss in the fact that right wing Kaapo Kakko has scored all of one goal and right wing Blake Wheeler had not yet scored his first wearing the Blueshirt, it is rather easy to understand why Laviolette has made some personnel changes up front independent of Chytil’s absence.
“I just wanted to give it a different look,” the head coach said. “I spoke with the players involved and we’re just trying to change it to see if something loosens up.
“Things have been going in a direction where we’re collecting points so everything has just kind of stayed the same but in the same sense I still think there’s room to push and produce more.”
Wheeler, who picked up an assist for his first point on Saturday, has been an option to join Kreider and Zibanejad since July 1, the day the 37-year-old winger signed on as a free agent after being bought out by Winnipeg.
In conjunction with Trocheck moving up to the second line after Chytil went down, Laviolette has packed his top-six with offensive quantities while turning the third unit into more of a checking-type line with Bonino skating between Kakko and Will Cuylle.
“There’s an opportunity for Kakko to play with different players and an opportunity for Blake, as well,” Laviolette said. “Blake has probably played most of his career on a top-two line.
“The last few games I’ve been noticing him more, a little more physical, quicker to pucks, generating a little bit more.”
The Rangers have been living large on a power play that has clocked in at 31.6 percent, fourth-best in the league. They have, for comparison sake, scored 12 PPGs in 57:33 with the man-advantage, while scoring 17 goals at five-on-five in 526:11.
But the Blueshirts are sailing into a great unknown without Fox running PP1. Since taking over for Tony DeAngelo on the right point two games in 2020-21, Fox has been on for 68.98 percent of the Rangers’ power-play time while on for 85.78 percent of the team’s goals.
His abilities to see the ice, create plays and deliver passes are unmatched. Erik Gustafsson can run an NHL power play, but no one quite runs it like Fox, who was playing at the height of his powers before going down. The power play will have to adapt.
The Rangers will have to adapt. The Rangers will have to improve. The Rangers and their revamped top-six will have to score while the club also tightens up in its own end following the 65-minute folly in Minny in which the Wild had a 98-41 advantage in attempts.
If not, 8-2-1 will become nothing but a fond memory.
Read more
