Trip down Vesey Street
REGARDING the Rangers, three weeks away from crossing (over into) the Atlantic:
1. Jimmy Vesey’s revival meeting in Saint Paul on Saturday in which the rookie not only scored his first goal in 15 games but played with authority at both ends of the ice was important for the Blueshirts.
Because Alain Vigneault needs to have the confidence to move Vesey off the fourth line and restore the Harvard product to a top-six role, allowing the coach to move J.T. Miller back onto Kevin Hayes’ third line. That would restore the club’s signature top-nine depth and create matchup headaches for opposing coaches.
Miller is a legitimate topsix NHLer, there is no doubt about that. When he is skating across from Rick Nash as he has the last two games, their dual straightline mentality challenges their opponents. They are a very good match and indeed are the team’s two best forwards by a considerable margin. But removing Miller from Hayes (and Michael Grabner) alters the Blueshirts’ chemistry and dilutes the team’s quality.
There is always a time and a place for Jesper Fast, such as the final 10 seconds of Saturday’s 3-2 victory over the Wild in which he went down to block a dangerous shot from Matt Dumba at the bottom of the right circle, but regular top-nine duty alongside Hayes and Grabner is neither.
The Rangers do not have a forward who is having anywhere close to an NHL top-50 season. They cannot rely on an elite forward to carry them through a playoff series. As such, the Blueshirts have to rely on their nine-deep front line and they are only a dangerous nine-deep when Vesey plays up and Miller skates with Hayes.
So the remaining 10 games should be devoted to identifying the most effective combinations on the top two lines while leaving the Grabner-Hayes-Miller unit alone. There is no need to fix what isn’t broken.
2. The defense was better Saturday night, partially because the Wild were sloppy and careless with the puck through the neutral zone. But have you noticed how consistently large the gaps have become in the Rangers’ defensive game? And how New York defensemen almost always seem to be backing in rather than standing their ground at the line?
That’s a byproduct of the Rangers’ failure to establish a consistent forecheck and possession game below the hash marks. When the Blueshirts are chasing the puck and/or when they take forever to clear their own end, they are reduced to chip-and-change that allows easy escape routes for the opposition.
How often lately have you seen five Rangers skating backward through the neutral zone? That’s sure not the way they played through the first two months when their aggressive attacks on the puck in the neutral zone generated turnovers and odd-man rushes aplenty.
3. I am not sure when sliding in front of the net became good defensive technique, but Nick Holden, who has been struggling for almost two months to find the form he displayed the first half of the season. He now seems to leave his feet as a default. Saturday night, Brendan Smith was adopting the same approach, albeit successfully knocking the puck off Nino Niederreiter’s stick to foil a two-on-one midway through the second period. This is most likely not the way assistant coach Jeff Beukeboom is drawing it up.
4. Rule One for the Rangers: get the puck to the net. Honestly, they insist on playing tic-tac-toe even when the defense has the middle square.
And in their own defensive end, more awareness, please — both at evenstrength and on the dysfunctional penalty-kill unit — of weak-side coverage.