IF the Rangers are not exactly in a mid-life crisis, they are at a mid-season crossroads, that’s for sure. And so is Tom Renney, who yesterday put his players through 30 minutes of grueling sprints, crossover skating drills and rink-width laps to conclude the first Punishment Practice of his four-year tenure as head coach.
It’s not good around the Rangers, not after three straight losses (0-2-1) in which they have scored a sum of three goals. The team is tight. Confidence is seeping out of the room in the manner of a balloon slowly leaking air. Frustration is mounting.
What’s more, there is a sense of widespread belief within the room that the team’s creativity is being stifled by a system whose tenants are becoming more conservative than Sean Hannity. The Rangers appear to be consumed with not making mistakes rather than attempting to force the opposition into making mistakes of its own. They seem obsessed with limiting scoring chances against, as opposed to generating chances themselves.
They seem, that is, to be following the game plan.
If Renney thought his players were inattentive during the first half hour of practice, the head coach had every right to put his team through the punishing bag skate. The Rangers would be better off, however, if Renney actually exerted his authority during games by enforcing accountability by benching repeat offenders.
The Rangers believe they have the best goaltending in the league. Then what’s the obsession with keeping scoring chances down to 12 a game? If Henrik Lundqvist is on your side, shouldn’t that allow you to take a few more calculated gambles rather than a few less?
It’s a vicious cycle. A team does not score, a team cannot score, the coaching staff reacts to that by implementing a system best suited to trying to win 1-0, which in turn makes it even more difficult for the team to score, which feeds into a loss of confidence, which feeds into issues that create bag skates.
The team is constantly lectured about having numbers above the puck and keeping the third man (very, very) high in order to guard against odd-man rushes. But this cautious approach discourages a hard forecheck, even if Renney insists that’s not the objective. Puck possession is playing defense, too.
Shut out through two periods by Boston on Saturday and Atlanta on Tuesday, the Rangers played each third period with abandon, sending two and sometimes three men deep, hunting the puck, gaining possession and applying constant pressure.
And they also did so because Renney cut down to three lines and got his most talented offensive players on the ice as much as possible. If the system is not stifling the Rangers, then the head coach’s insistence on using four lines most certainly is.
Somehow, Fred Sjostrom led forwards in ice time through two periods Tuesday night. That should be a mathematical impossibility, but it wasn’t.
When Nikolai Zherdev played 22:58 on Tuesday, it was only the fifth time all year and first time in 18 games that the winger played at least 20 minutes. It was the first time in 15 games he’d even played 18:00. That’s crazy. So was using Sjostrom and Blair Betts on two of the team’s seven overtime shifts.
The Rangers aren’t choking. But there are times, lots of times lately, when it looks as if they’re being choked.