Playing five games in seven nights is never easy in the NHL. But it will be even harder for the Rangers if Marian Gaborik doesn’t start to find the back of the net.
The first game of that stretch is tonight against the Maple Leafs at the Garden.
“Gabby’s a great player. He’s going to come out of this running, and he will finish the year very strong,” left winger Wojtek Wolski said yesterday after practice. “For everyone else, we just have to play the same way and help him as much as we can, since he is kind of creating opportunities for us.”
Gaborik has not registered a goal in his past eight games, and has 11 in 33 games this season. His longest career goal-less drought is 14 games, during the 2003-04 season with the Wild. Rangers coach John Tortorella has been mixing and matching lines all season, and though Gaborik will have new linemates tonight (Ruslan Fedotenko and Artem Anisimov), the problem hasn’t been with whom he has been paired.
“He is in a little bit of a funk here and [changing lines] is not going to cure his problems,” Tortorella said. “We’ve tried that, and he realizes that. He’ll get out of this. He is too good a player to continue to go down that road as far as the slump that he is in. He wants to help the team and, in the big picture, I think he is going to.”
The Rangers have lost three of four. They’ve scored six goals in their past four games and nine goals in their past 14. And if Gaborik isn’t going to provide the offense, it needs to come from somewhere. Wolski has two goals in four games since being acquired from the Coyotes for Michal Rozsival on Jan. 10, and could provide that spark.
“I like what he did the last game, a lot of second efforts,” Tortorella said after Wolski had a goal and an assist and was a plus-2 in the Rangers’ 3-2 loss to the Flyers on Sunday. “He has a tremendous upside and is going to help this team.”
The Rangers, who sit in seventh place in the Eastern Conference, are five points ahead of ninth-seeded Carolina, having played one more game — which means they need goals and wins.
“We’ve just got to come out right off the bat and play the way we do in the second and third periods,” Wolski said. “We’ve got to make sure we start off games like that and don’t put ourselves behind. That, combined with capitalizing on the power play.”
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The Rangers are 2-0-1 against the Leafs this season, having won both games in Toronto and losing 4-3 in overtime at MSG in October. … Tortorella said Dale Weise would be a healthy scratch tonight with Kris Newbury inserted in his place. … The power play unit has scored two goals in its last 32 attempts over the past 10 games.
DEVS’ CORRENTE OUT
Devils rookie defenseman Matt Corrente will miss two to four weeks with a shoulder injury suffered in fighting Steve Downie to an impressive draw during Friday’s 5-2 victory in Tampa.
Corrente, the Devils’ 2006 first-round pick, missed two games in November with a sprained left shoulder. He also missed seven games earlier in the season with a broken hand suffered in another bout.
— Mark Everson