Sloppy Blueshirts sure look familiar
W ELCOME back to December.
“I don’t know, it was kind of like back when we were struggling,” Dan Girardi told The Post after the Rangers were all but blown out 52 by the Devils in New Jersey on Tuesday. “We didn’t do a good job of coverage, we couldn’t get our sticks on pucks; we weren’t able to get it out even on second and third chances.
“All those little things creeped back into our game and I really couldn’t say why. It’s stuff that we thought we had cleaned out.”
Thought they had cleaned out after the 392 holiday season crash, and to a great extent had in constructing a 1352 run into this one that represented time travel back to a nightmare.
Henrik Lundqvist was the Blueshirts’ best player by leaps and bounds, and yet the Devils still pumped four past The King before sending the final one into an empty net. It marked the first time in 13 games the NHL’s lowestscoring team chinned past three, and only the seventh time in the club’s last 47 matches.
It was that ugly for the Rangers, who led 21 after a solid first period and then imploded immediately after the intermission, surrendering three oddman rushes within the first 4:45, not one of which New Jersey was able to convert.
“They probably got sht from their coach after the first,” Derick Brassard, who wasn’t very good at all, said. “We have to expect that. Maybe it caught us off guard.”
Must have, because the Rangers never had even a tenuous grasp on the second period. There were blunders right off the bat from each partner of the putative first defense tandem comprised on this night by Girardi and Keith Yandle. The Blueshirts were outshot 175 and outattempted 2813 during the middle 20 minutes in which New Jersey took a 32 lead.
Excuses were there for the Rangers, who, to their credit, did not, would not and honestly could not use the absences of Ryan McDonagh (jaw, neck spasms) and Marc Staal (lower body “tweak”) as cover for their slapstick performance without the puck.
For not only are injuries a fact of NHL life, veterans Girardi, Yandle, Kevin Klein and Dan Boyle were all below par, lining up with rookies Dylan McIlrath and sameday recall Brady Skjei. Indeed, Alain Vigneault would have none of it, citing Girardi, Yandle and Klein by name after it was over. The coach could easily have also cited Boyle, whose game is noticeably deteriorating after playing his off, leftside for the seventh time in the last eight games.
“Obviously we missed two of our top four, but we had enough guys who have played in the league for a long time and Dylan and Brady are good defensemen,” said Girardi. “We just didn’t do the job.”
Neither do the absences of the team’s two top leftsiders ade quately explain the inadequate defensive zone work of the forwards, who time and again were turned back in their own end in the second period. Everyone admires Mats Zuccarello, but has the winger always been this much of a liability in his own zone as he has this season?
“We tried to play the same way,” said Derek Stepan. “When guys are out, everybody has to step up into bigger roles. This is part of it. “This is the world we’re in.” The fourth and final Battle of the Hudson was a frantic affair through the first two periods. The Rangers generated an oddman rush 1:50 into the game. The desperate Devils had their first breakaway 6:10 into the match that was followed immediately by a New York 2on1. It was as if two scientific boxers decided to meet in the center of the ring off the opening bell and slug it out.
Lo and behold, the Rangers went down for the count against a hungrier and more desperate opponent even though they were able to kill both a 5:00 match penalty assessed to J.T. Miller for cutting Sergey Kalinin in a fight while his hand was taped below the wrist (Rule 46.15) at 19:59 of the second and a followup minor to Brassard at 5:40 of the third.
“I don’t know what happened,” said Lundqvist. “Seriously.”
The itinerary calls for a game in St. Louis on Thursday and one in Dallas on Saturday. It does not include anything about a trip in time back to December.