Options are good, so despite a scathing criticism from his coach upon his most recent demotion to the minors, J.T. Miller now returns to the Rangers at the most crucial moment.
The Blueshirts recalled the mercurial 21-year-old forward on Monday afternoon, and he is set to join the team for practice on Tuesday as the Rangers begin preparation for their first-round playoff series with the Flyers, starting Thursday in the Garden.
Miller has been sent down three times this season, but on April 3, he went down to AHL Hartford with as brutally honest and cutting remarks from a coach as has been heard in recent time.
“He just hasn’t earned the right to be at this level on a regular basis,” Alain Vigneault said on that day in Denver. “He needs to show more commitment on the ice and off. Until he does that, he hasn’t earned the right.”
Miller was the 15th overall pick of the 2011 draft, and he has put up impressive numbers while playing for Hartford. In 41 games with the Wolf Pack this season, he had 15 goals and 43 points, along with a plus-10 rating. Yet in 30 games with the Rangers this season, he had three goals and six points. The previous year he had two goals and two assists in 26 games while making his pro debut.
“J.T. has to figure it out and hopefully he will,” Vigneault said, before adding the kicker. “When he does, we’re going to have a good player. If he doesn’t, he will be a good minor-league player.”
Miller has seemingly become an option only because the Rangers are now trying to fill in for the injured Chris Kreider, who underwent surgery March 28 for an undisclosed ailment to his left hand and continues to be out indefinitely, missing the final nine games of the regular season.
Losing a top-six forward is not easy for any team, but the Rangers’ lack of depth up front was immediately exposed when they got infuriated with Miller and turned instead to 22-year-old Swede Jesper Fast.
Fast had made the team out of training camp, but couldn’t consistently stay in the lineup, playing eight games through the month of October before being sent down. Upon getting to Hartford, he soon suffered a high-ankle sprain, and finally returned to action in mid-December. From there, he steadily improved, and was recalled in time to play against the Hurricanes at the Garden on April 8 and finish the season out with the two games that followed.
“He’s played well, very smart player and goes on the ice and plays to his strengths,” Vigneault said of Fast after he had a team-high five hits while beating the Sabres 2-1 on April 10. “He’s much more physical than a lot of people think. He plays the body every opportunity he gets, so he’s going to be a help for us.”
The availability of Kreider moving forward is unknown, as he didn’t travel with the team to Montreal for the regular-season finale on Saturday and the team is not allowing him to speak to the media. Kreider was skating over the past week, but was not stick-handling with his left hand at all.
Because the team is revealing so little information about his status, it leaves only speculation about a time frame. If four-to-six weeks might seem reasonable — about the normal recovery time for a broken bone in the hand, not implying that’s what he has — then that would leave Kreider as a slim possibility for either Games 6 or 7, if necessary, of this series. The league so wonderfully planned those for April 29 and 30, the only back-to-back games of any first-round series, and two games that would be played in different buildings — with Game 6 in Philadelphia and Game 7 at the Garden.
Of course, all of that is speculation. What is not is Miller is here, and with certainly quite a bit to prove.