The foundation of work ethic has been laid. There’s nothing lazy or complacent about the Rangers, and that is not a concern as they face the Panthers in Florida tonight in the sandwich game between Thursday’s 4-1 defeat in Washington and Monday afternoon’s Winter Classic in Philadelphia.
“We don’t take anything for granted,” Dan Girardi told The Post. “We don’t go on the ice with the attitude that anything is going to come easy, or that because we’ve won games in the past we’ll continue to win them just by showing up.
“We understand that we are going to have to earn our wins.”
The Rangers have lost two straight in regulation just twice in going 22-9-4 in their first 35 games. They have had two other brief streaks of 0-1-1 and an 0-1-2 streak with which they started the season. That, of course, stands in stark contrast to the streaks of seven, five and five straight victories the Rangers have constructed thus far, the last of which came to an end in DC.
“We accept the accountability when we don’t play as well as we should,” said Girardi. “We need to get back to the details and try and start another winning streak in Florida.”
When a team wins consistently, individual failings are often camouflaged. When a club loses, such issues are highlighted and serve to underline the fragility of success.
So the question is how long the Rangers will be able to continue to thrive with Brad Richards in as deep a quagmire as his game at both ends of the ice has fallen over the last eight games, a period of time beginning Dec. 13 during which he has appeared on Page Six exactly as often as he has appeared on the score sheet (once).
The question is whether the Rangers will continue to be able to win on a consistent basis with negligible production from their bottom two lines that feature Brian Boyle (scoreless in his last 16 games, one goal in his last 31); John Mitchell (one goal in his last 14 games, that an empty-netter); Brandon Prust (scoreless in his last 30 games in minimal ice time outside the penalty kill); and Mike Rupp (scoreless in limited action in six games since his return from Injured Reserve).
The question is whether the Rangers will be able to consistently overcome a power play that has fallen back into a 2-for-26 morass over the last eight games due to a combination of stagnancy on the setup and an increasing number of bad entries into the offensive zone.
The question is essentially whether the Rangers can prosper through the grind of a marathon while getting consistent production from only the Derek Stepan-Marian Gaborik-Artem Anisimov unit and from the relentless Ryan Callahan.
The question, therefore, isn’t about work ethic or commitment. It’s about goal-scoring, because no team can win 2-1 every night, not even those with the best of intentions.