LINE CHANGE AT GARDEN

No expectations and no pressure

SO HERE we go. When the Rangers take the ice for Thursday’s season opener at the Garden, they’ll see a powerful Predators team that has been on the cusp of winning the Cup for a few years now, and from which nothing less than a championship will be deemed acceptable.

In other words, the Way the Rangers Were.

Great expectations come with a commensurate burden. The Rangers learned and lived that over the half-dozen seasons, since the 2011-12 breakthrough that produced a second-overall finish, a regular-season Eastern Conference title and a trip to the conference finals.

But now, a Presidents’ Trophy, a trip to the Cup final and another to the conference finals later, not so much. Now, not so much at all. The Rangers are projected, and with relatively good reason, to be a bottomfeeding lottery team.

“There haven’t been any games yet,” Marc Staal, a resident of Broadway since 2007, astutely noted fol- lowing Wednesday’s tamped-down practice. “No one really knows.”

Shh. This is the time of expert prognostications. Everyone knows. Besides, who asked the alternate captain? Oh, that’s right. I did.

“I look around the room and see talented, hard-working guys so I don’t see why we should go into the season thinking we’re less than other teams,” Staal said. “Teams that work hard, play for each other, get their system in place and compete every game are very difficult to play against. The mindset is to reach that point quickly. If we can do that, then we’ll see who we are.”

The corollary also holds true. If the Rangers do not support one another, cannot put into place the system that David Quinn has been preaching since Day 1 of camp and are not the hardest working team on the ice, we will also see who they are. Quickly.

“We know what people are saying about us,” said newly named alternate captain Jesper Fast. “We want to prove everyone wrong. It will be different for us starting the season as an underdog, but I think maybe we can use that to our advantage.”

The Rangers haven’t been this lightly regarded since 2005-06, which coincidentally represents the last time the team went into a season without a captain. A consensus pick to finish last overall, the Blueshirts led their division for most of the season before ending their playoff drought at seven years. That was Henrik Lundqvist’s rookie season, the one in which Jaromir Jagr carried the team with his franchise record 54 goals and 123 points.

“It’s important for us to be realistic but that doesn’t mean that we should let people on the outside define us,” Lundqvist said. “You don’t want to put too much on the team if it can’t handle it. “When you’re expected to win the Stanley Cup, there’s a lot of internal day-to-day pressure. You don’t want to put that on a team that’s not ready for it. We should challenge ourselves to be the best we can be. If we can be that, then maybe expectations change during the season. “It’s going to be a tight league. The mindset is how good can we be, let’s really push it here and try to get into the playoffs.” It is never easy to win a game, but let’s face it, points come easier to underdogs in October than at any other time. Projected powerhouses are generally coming off shorter summers. The upper-echelon has more of a tendency to ease into the year. Champions and runners-up generally don’t invest the same importance in earlyseason games as ne’er-do-wells. It is human nature.

It is also important for the Rangers to generate success early under Quinn, who has talked the talk with his players — and talked, and talked, and talked some more, while also taking the time to listen, by the way — and now needs his team to walk the walk out of the gate in order to establish a foundation and minimize doubt about the new program.

Slow starts can, of course, be overcome. The 2013-14 Rangers, in Alain Vigneault’s first year behind the bench, opened 3-7 while absorbing frightening defeats of 9-2, 6-0 and 4-0. We know how that season turned out. Of course, that was a veteran team capable of self-correction. This one? Not quite in a comparable position.

“There’s been an air of optimism every year I’ve been at camp, and from that sense, this one is no different,” Staal said. “We’ve had a good camp and we believe in what we’re doing. I think we expect a lot of each other.

“But the fact that not a lot is expected of us — it’s not taken for granted that we’re getting in and winning a couple of rounds — is different. But that also lifts a weight and can have a kind of a freeing effect on guys. So we’ll see.”

Here we go.