Lessen plan
After sloppy defeat, Rangers move to learn from and limit mistakes
To flush or not to flush? That is the question the Rangers were left to answer Tuesday after a disappointing shootout loss to the Stars on Monday night at the Garden.
In the course of a long season, it can be easy to dismiss a loss as a loss and quickly move on to the next game instead of dwelling on where it all went wrong, but the Rangers fell somewhere in between ahead of Wednesday’s game at Ottawa.
“We’re going to look at a couple points that I definitely want to point out before the Ottawa game,” coach Alain Vigneault after practice Tuesday. “So we’re not totally going to [flush it]. A lot of times that’s a good thing to do. In an 82-game schedule, there are some nights when for whatever circumstances, you just move on to the next game. But there are a couple areas for us that could be good teaching moments from [Monday] night’s game that I am going to use [Wednesday] morning.”
Vigneault declined to share the specific areas he planned to point out to his team, since he hadn’t yet shared them with his players, but said that during Tuesday’s practice, they put an emphasis on five-on-five work, including backchecking harder and tightening up the defense between forwards and defensemen.
Rick Nash, who scored the Rangers’ lone goal Monday, said the message from Vi- gneault was they needed to be better inside the blue lines.
“The blue lines were the difference in the game,” Nash said. “At our blue line, we didn’t get the pucks out, we didn’t make the plays. And at their blue line, same thing. We didn’t get the pucks in or make the plays that needed to be made.”
Outside of the effort of backup goalie Ondrej Pavelec (44 saves), the Rangers weren’t afraid to be critical of their own play with Mats Zuccarello calling Monday’s first two periods “embarrassing.” That made for a hard practice Tuesday, but one that began to help the Rangers move past the loss.
“Being in professional sports, you have to have a short-term memory,” Nash said. “But at the same time, you have to recognize what you did last night and you gotta try to fix it. It’s kind of an in between of both — letting go but knowing it can’t happen again.”
After the Rangers were outshot 33-10 by the Stars in the first two periods, Vigneault mixed up the lines for the third period, which resulted in Nash’s late goal to send the game to overtime.
But the changes were only temporary. Against the Senators, Vigneault said he plans to roll out the same lines with which the Rangers started Monday’s game, choosing to “trust your players, trust your leadership group,” instead of overreacting.
“For this last little stretch of over a month, we’ve been pretty close to one of the top two teams as far as winning percentage in the NHL,” he said. “In that big body of work, we’ve had some real good moments, we’ve had some other games where a period might have been more challenging. … It seems this year more than ever, teams can take over a period. [Monday] night we had a team that basically took over two periods against us.”
But with that game and Tuesday’s practice over, the Rangers already were beginning to look ahead before they even boarded their flight to Ottawa.
“I think right after the game, hopefully guys reflect on what happened and you try to learn from it and move on,” Henrik Lundqvist said. “We have games coming up every second day so you can’t get stuck overanalyzing stuff. You learn and you move on.”