Awful start to the new year

MAYBE in their minds, the Rangers were partying the night away shirtless in Miami at the Bieber Bash. Yeah, that must be it. Because, honestly, there is no acceptable explanation for the Blueshirts’ collective forfeiture of Tuesday’s match against the 28th-overall club from Buffalo at the Garden by the afterthought score of 4-1.

They stayed on the stool, threw in the towel, pleaded nolo contendre. They couldn’t make a play, wouldn’t or couldn’t move their feet, couldn’t complete a pass, couldn’t construct more than a shift or two of coherence.

And the thing is, a game like this just a couple of weeks removed from separate yet almost equally odious performances in drubbings by the Penguins and Wild is enough to make you question the underpinnings, if not the validity, of this 26-13-1 enterprise. Three times in a hockey fortnight is two too many for any team, let alone one with pretensions of playing deep into the spring, even if that particular notion seems ridiculous this day after.

The defense — all six of them, from worse to worst, and in any order from alphabetical to numerical to astrological, will do — was abominable with and without the puck. The group of forwards was perhaps just a tad better, and just barely that, and if so, only because of just how low the bar had been set. The goaltender, on this night Henrik Lundqvist, was probably the best Ranger on the ice, which is to damn the King with the faintest of praise imaginable.

You could see it from the start. The Rangers were sleepwalking. There was the obligatory first-minute icing, this one at the 19-second mark. Changes were slow and undisciplined. Support was a foreign concept. Everything the Rangers did was soft. The first shot — from 55 feet — came at 9:54 of the first period. The next time the Sabres needed a goalie — Anders Nilsson was the innocent bystander — came at 16:00.

Unfortunately, Derek Stepan must have had laryngitis.

For the previous time the Blueshirts graced the Garden ice, it took a tirade from the alternate captain to rouse his teammates out of their lethargy after having fallen behind the Senators 2-0 within the opening 3:10 of what became a 4-3 victory on Dec. 27. This time, no lecture, no response, no heartbeat.

Hey, even Mark Messier didn’t stare down his teammates into a response every time, either.

Coach Alain Vigneault blamed himself and his staff for not properly preparing the team. But seriously, that responsibility belongs to the athletes themselves. How many times do the Rangers need to be advised by the coach not to ice the puck on the first shift? Or maybe the opening faceoff should just be held in the New York zone to save everyone the trouble.

“The icings? Maybe that’s one example of how we need to focus on our execution right from the start and take an extra half-second to be sure that we make that pass,” Stepan said. “We have to be prepared, we have to be able to execute. That’s everything in this league.”

Ryan McDonagh, a co-conspirator, said, “This has happened here too many times in this stretch.”

Dan Girardi, who struggled again while paired with Brady Skjei on a tandem that has been delinquent in its three games intact, referred to the proverbial mirror. Lundqvist seconded that notion.

But why now and why again? These Rangers are built to overcome their blue line deficiencies by outscoring their mistakes but there was no one remotely equipped to come to the club’s rescue in this one.

Another one or two — and with a match coming right up Wednesday in Philadelphia and another in Columbus on Saturday in which the Jackets have a shot at setting the NHL record for consecutive victories at 18 — and GM Jeff Gorton will have much to ponder during the bye week that begins Sunday.

Because again: this wasn’t a onetime excusable offense to be expunged from the record but rather what has become part of the Rangers’ modus operandi. And seemingly out of nowhere after two full months of essentially unimpeachable effort.

“It was an awful game from us. Just an awful game,” Stepan told The Post. “We’d better digest this, learn from it and correct it. It’s happened a lot lately. We have to figure out what’s going on and we have to do it now.”

Party on.