URGENCY DEFICIT
Vigneault’s goal: Shake Rangers out of malaise
Here is the line Rangers coach Alain Vigneault drives home as often as possible — with his team, with the media, with anyone who will listen.
“There are no easy games,” he said once again after Friday’s practice. “There are 30 good teams in the NHL right now. That’s the way the league is.”
Vigneault constantly stresses how tight the competitive nature of the league is, that the difference between winning and losing can be so small that he needs his players to be at the top of their collective game to give them any chance to win. He saw it on Thursday night in Buffalo, when a 3-2 thirdperiod lead turned into a 4-3 loss, his once high-flying Blueshirts now 3-4-1 in their past eight games as they prepared to host the Hurricanes on Saturday afternoon at the Garden.
“Any team on any given night can beat any other team,” Vigneault said. “And urgency is part of the equation on playing well. Playing well gives you a better chance of winning. Because if you look at the standings right now the way they are, anybody can beat anybody on any given night. So players have to be ready, they have to prepare themselves, you have to play with urgency.”
What’s being implied, then, is that maybe the urgency in the Rangers’ game has dropped off since their terrific 13-4-0 start that has now sagged 16-8-1. They are no longer scoring four-plus goals every game, and their lead atop the Metropolitan Division is just two points over the Penguins.
But to drive home his point about competitive parity, Vigneault used none other than the Islanders, his cross-river rival that just spent the past two days dig- ging themselves out of last-overall in the NHL standings by beating the Penguins at home and the Capitals in Washington.
“I don’t believe at all that the New York Islanders are a last-place team,” Vigneault said. “But in the last two days, they beat the Stanley Cup champions, and the next day, they had the Presidents’ Trophywinning team waiting for them, fresh at home, and they beat them. That’s how competitive the NHL is.
Now Vigneault’s task is figuring out how to make sure his team doesn’t fall into the quagmire of mediocrity. The good start already has padded this small drop, but if the Rangers fall for much longer, they will no longer have much room for error.
It was inevitable that they were going to have to deal with a drop-off in scoring. The opportunities still are coming, but a statistic such as a 12-percent shooting percentage was some- thing they couldn’t sustain.
Another example Vigneault pulled out was from Thursday’s loss, when the 3-2 lead stayed right there despite wide-open looks from Kevin Hayes, Jimmy Vesey and Michael Grabner, all stoned by Buffalo backup goalie — and former Islanders farmhand — Anders Nilsson.
And it was inevitable teams were going to start studying the tape of the Rangers’ fast transition game and realize they could slow them ”down by clogging the neutral zone. It’s exactly what the Hurricanes did to them on Tuesday before some heroics from Rick Nash and a late goal from Jimmy Vesey secured a 3-2 win. That 1-3-1 trap has given the Blueshirts trouble, and it has made it clear the NHL not only is a league of parity, but also is one filled with smart hockey minds who figure out different ways to win.
“I think you’ve got to make the right plays,” Vigneault said. “When there is a certain amount of room out there, there is a right play to make. All the different scenarios that you can see — and especially we’re talking through the neutral zone — we know them inside and out. We’ve analyzed it, we know how to beat them, we know the execution that’s needed.
“We just have to go out there and execute better.”