The Rangers are seven games into the season, and more importantly, almost 15 percent finished with the lockout-shortened 48-game regular season.
Following a 3-0 home-loss to the Penguins on Thursday, the Rangers (3-4) know there needs to be changes. They know the kind of team they want to be. They want to reclaim the consistently hard-hitting, shot-blocking, puck-chasing, energy-inspired shifts that helped them to the best record in the Eastern Conference last season.
Brian Boyle knows that won’t just happen. The Rangers need to make it happen — and they have little time to figure out how.
“We need to find more energy,” Boyle said following Friday’s practice. “We need to be more of ourselves that we’ve come to know the last few years. It’s also an urgency to make sure it happens. We’re not just sitting back saying, ‘Oh, it’s going to be fine.’ We’re going to go out and do it. We’re going to get it in our heads that it stops now. Being consistent, being harder to play against, all that stuff has to happen right now.”
One benefit of the condensed schedule is immediate opportunity. The Rangers, with offensive ineptitude to overcome, play the Lightning Saturday night in Tampa, Fla.. Even before captain Ryan Callahan was lost for 10-14 days with a partially dislocated shoulder, the Rangers had issues getting production outside their top line.
With the team ranked 22nd in the league with 2.29 goals per game, second-line players Carl Hagelin and Derek Stepan, who both are scoreless this season, are aware attention is being put on them and it’s necessary for them to respond if the team hopes to replicate last season’s success.
“Our top guys have scored enough, it’s a matter of the second, third and fourth lines to pick up the slack and be more creative offensively,” said Hagelin, who had 14 goals in 64 games last season.
Stepan stressed the difficulty in not trying too hard to score. Eventually, a puck will find the back of the net, and he can’t worry when.
“It happens all the time in any hockey player’s career, you just get in these little dips, these little funks, and you just have to try and find a way to snap it and get the ball rolling again,” Stepan said. “You just don’t want to press or grip your stick too hard. You just have to relax and find a way to put one in. That’s the hardest thing to do in this situation.”
Coach John Tortorella said he believes the team only will see consistent results when its mentality changes.
“When you’re tentative, you’re just not sure about yourself, there’s a number of guys who are fighting it a little bit, especially on the offensive side and that transforms into over-thinking,” he said. “This game isn’t for thinking. It’s about reacting, it’s about being quick, it’s about being hard and that’s the mental part of it. Hopefully some good things happen and they start building that type of swagger and mindset. We’ve shown signs of it this year, but it’s been up and down. It’s been a roller coaster.”
* Rookie Chris Kreider was on the ice for the third straight day, following the discovery of a bone chip in his right ankle, but it is likely he will miss his fifth straight game. Kreider said he has felt “definite improvement” and expects to skate again Saturday, but he’s still considered day-to-day.
“You have to be smart with something like this and take it one day at a time,” Kreider said. “I have to go through a full practice to really judge where I am.”