Playoff-bound Rangers have plenty to improve
It wasn’t surprising to see a Rangers locker room late Tuesday night in San Jose with players far from jubilant about locking up their spot in the playoffs.
Their qualification hasn’t been in doubt. They expected nothing less than getting back to the postseason, and this is a group expecting much more from itself than it showed in the first two periods of Tuesday’s 5-4 overtime loss before showing life in the third, and expects more from itself than the last stretch of 10 games in which it has won only three times.
“Our process needs to be better,” Chris Kreider said. “It needs to be the duration of the game, everyone. It can’t just be a handful of guys every night. If you’re gonna win in the playoffs everyone’s got to step up, and every single night a different group or someone needs to raise their game even more. If you have an off night, it can’t be a ‘C’ or ‘D’ game.”
After the Rangers’ 6-3 loss in Anaheim Sunday, Alain Vigneault said there were too many players who brought a ‘C’ game, and Tuesday the coach said the team “didn’t show up” for the first 39 minutes, a troubling pair of assessments with only five games left before the Rangers enter a best-of-seven series.
Only a few players had good enough performances on Tuesday. The entire defense corps needs to be better. The Rangers recently haven’t had enough of their forwards going on a nightto-night basis. Jimmy Vesey was so off on Tuesday he was glued to the bench the entire third period.
Michael Grabner is trying, boy is he trying, with six more shots on goal and three misses on Tuesday, but after surprising everyone with 26 goals in 53 games, he has just one in his last 18.
And then there’s Henrik Lundqvist, still rusty coming off his hip injury and clearly frustrated after he allowed five more goals on Tuesday.
“I’m just extremely disappointed right now. That’s what I have to say right now,” Lundqvist said. “I’m glad we’re in, but I want to get the job done. I want to get a win. I want to help the team get wins, but we found a way to lose this one in the end. We played really well in the third. I felt like we did a lot of good things to win this one in the end even though the second period was not great. I didn’t come up with the extra saves there in the end, and it bothers me.”
There was acknowledgement from all that the game wasn’t good enough until an improved third, something the team hopes to build on.
“The other team gets paid, too. Everyone’s lifting their game,” Kreider said. “We did some very encouraging things in the third period, some things that we haven’t done in a very long time. So that’s something we can hang our hat on moving forward. We’d like to have the two points, but that’s more important than everything.
“The process is the most important thing.”