The puck isn’t moving from the back end and it’s not being chipped in on the front end. The Rangers all of a sudden seem to want to play meat-and-potatoes hockey only some of the time, and guess what, there’s no Jaromir Jagr to blame.
Last night, against a trapping Dallas team that squeezed the life out of the game, the Rangers simply lacked the discipline to take what they were given. They overhandled the puck and they tried to score pretty when scoring dirty was required.
That’s likely why the Rangers scored once, a Markus Naslund power play slam-dunk off a rear-boards ricochet early in the first on their way to a 2-1 loss to the Stars at the Garden in which Mike Modano ripped the left circle winner past a screened Henrik Lundqvist at 8:03 of the third.
“When we create chances and they don’t go in, we start to change and try to do too much,” an exasperated Brandon Dubinsky said. “We try to score on the perfect shot, but it doesn’t happen that way.
“When we get the puck in deep and cycle, we get guys open and get opportunities. If we stick to that, we’re going to score goals. We do it for 30 or 40 minutes, but then we get frustrated, like at the start of the third period in this game. We need to do it for 60 minutes.
“We have the program to be successful. We have to believe in it from start to finish. The way we’re approaching it, we have stretches where we score in bunches, but to be a consistent winner, we have to stick to the program shift after shift, game after game.”
The 6-2-1 Rangers (1-2-1 in their last four) are still carrying three extra forwards. Patrick Rissmiller got into his second game last night to little effect while Petr Prucha sat for the sixth time in the last seven games, joining Dan Fritsche and freshman Lauri Korpikoski as scratches.
That accounted for $3,492,533 of cap charges in street clothes.
Stars 2 Rangers 1