Alain Vigneault spent part of Thursday afternoon talking about hangovers.
He wasn’t speaking about ones incurred from nights of drinking, but ones from the different points of this tumultuous NHL season, his first behind the Rangers bench, when his players have been put through acute physical and emotional strain.
First was the Olympic break in February, when some of his best players did not rest, but went to Sochi, Russia, and played in an intense two-week tournament. Coming back partially burned out were the likes of Henrik Lundqvist, Rick Nash and Ryan McDonagh.
Then there was the circus of Wednesday afternoon, when the rumors leading up to the 3 p.m. trade deadline were plentiful, and in the end, his team had its head cut off in exchanging its own captain, Ryan Callahan, for the longtime leader of the Lightning, Martin St. Louis.
“Yesterday,” Vigneault said Thursday, “was a challenging day.”
Joining the lineup for Wednesday night’s 3-2 overtime loss to the Maple Leafs at the Garden, St. Louis showed glimpses of his spectacular offensive vision and playmaking ability — all while the Rangers lost their third in a row.
Yet with 19 games remaining and a playoff spot far from a certainty, Vigneault knows there is no time to waste on sentimentality, and only time to focus on the task at hand. That starts Friday night in Carolina against the Hurricanes, one of the 12 remaining road games left on the schedule.
“An example I can give you is our guys coming back from the Olympics, they have had a short hangover, and it has to be over. You know, Hank needs to be the Hank that we saw before going to the Olympics,” Vigneault said of Lundqvist. “Nasher needs to be the Nasher that we saw.
“OK, now we’ve lost our captain, some guys have lost a very close friend. I understand the feelings that go with that, but we can’t suffer from the hangover. That was [Wednesday]. It has to be a short one. We have to move on and build new relationships.
“Anytime you change one player, you change the dynamics of your group. Yes, we’ve lost a very important member, but I think we’ve added a great piece. We need to let that dynamic form and I think it’s going to be real good.”
After his first practice with the team, it seemed St. Louis was still a little bit shell-shocked from the past 24 hours, when he forced his way from the only NHL team he had known to the one he hand-picked.
“You sit on the bench [on Wednesday], and the night before I was in St. Louis, playing for Tampa, for so long, and it happened kind of quick,” St. Louis said. “You don’t really have time to be emotional about it. You have to get ready to play a game.”
It seems St. Louis immediately has rekindled some chemistry with former Lightning teammate Brad Richards, the center with whom he won a Stanley Cup in 2004. The Rangers could certainly use a boost in offense in order to try and gain some ground on the streaking Flyers in the suddenly competitive Metropolitan Division.
“We’re in the thick of things here, this is a really crucial time of the season,” St. Louis said. “There’s not much time to think and reflect. I know I will reflect at some point, probably this summer. Those 14 years were great years in Tampa, but this is a new chapter in my life and I’m really excited about it.”