The playoff math does not look good — it figures to be all but impossible for them to climb into postseason position in their final 10 games — but the Rangers have not surrendered, even after their crushing 2-1 loss in Boston on Sunday.
“No one in here is gonna quit,” captain Chris Drury said yesterday following practice. “No one in here is gonna mope around. We’ve just gotta do everything we can to win one game. That’s it.”
Getting one win has been enough of a challenge for the Blueshirts this year. They will take a particularly ill-timed three-game losing streak to the Garden tomorrow night, when they are visited by the Islanders, one of the few teams that remain behind the Rangers in the Eastern Conference.
When pressed on any subject, Drury repeatedly returned to his point that the Rangers can’t get ahead of themselves — not about their vanishing postseason chances and not about their next four games, three of which come against the last-place Isles and Maple Leafs.
“I don’t think we can look that far ahead,” he said. “We’re not in a position to.”
Not after dropping perhaps their biggest game of the season on Sunday, which plunged the Rangers five points behind the Bruins for the last postseason spot, as well as four back of the surging Thrashers for ninth place.
“If we go on a run we can still do it,” Marc Staal said. “Hopefully, the teams we need to lose [will] lose and we get in.”
That’s a long shot, at best. The Bruins visit the Thrashers tonight, but the result doesn’t appear likely to affect the Blueshirts.
“We can’t control what they’re doing,” Drury said. “We can’t worry about what they’re doing.”
Instead, the Rangers spent most of yesterday working on their power play, which was scoreless in six chances on Sunday and is 1-for-16 over the three straight losses.
The power play is just one of the things that have plagued them this season, and it looks as if it’s too late to fix it.
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Coach John Tortorella said that Ryan Callahan, who missed practice, was scheduled to be looked at by the doctors yesterday and that Sean Avery sat out after blocking a puck on Sunday.
The Rangers signed free agent defenseman Lee Baldwin. The 6-foot-4 Baldwin, 21, played for the University of Alaska Anchorage this year and had a goal, nine assists and 51 penalty minutes in 32 games. He also spent three seasons in juniors in the British Columbia Hockey League.