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NEW YORK — Just how bad are things right now for the New York Rangers?
That all seems to depend on who you ask.
After another embarrassing home loss — this one an 8-4 defeat at the hands of the Ottawa Senators in a game that only seemed somewhat close in the end after the visitors let their collective foot off the gas after potting the first six goals of the night — the range of comments in the home locker room at Madison Square Garden went anywhere from anger to embarrassment to simply unrealistic.
“Not good enough,” said forward Mika Zibanejad, who tallied two assists and has likely been the most consistent player on the team all season.
“Our start is not great at all, obviously. We just dig ourselves a hole. It’s tough enough to win as it is in this league, but if you spot a team four (first period) goals, you’re not making it much easier.”
For the second straight game, a member of the leadership group took an unnecessary early penalty to put the team shorthanded; in Monday night’s loss to Seattle, it was captain J.T. Miller and in Wednesday night’s debacle against a team playing on the second night of a back-to-back, it was alternate captain Vincent Trocheck’s holding penalty just 93 seconds in that seemed to open the floodgates, leading to Drake Batherson’s game-opening power play goal.
On the heels of a nationally televised 10-2 embarrassment in Boston at the hands of the Bruins this past weekend, it’s been yet another shocking stretch for a Blueshirts group that now finds itself dead last in the Eastern Conference standings. In a terse exchange after the game, Trocheck was asked why that humiliating loss didn’t seem to be resonating the way it should.
“It’s resonating, I promise,” Trocheck offered.
The results, of course, aren’t reflective of that.
After a blowout win in the Winter Classic over the two-time defending Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers seemed to provide hope of a possible turnaround, it’s been just the opposite; the Rangers have lost the next five games and been outscored 30-12 over that stretch.
Over the majority of those five contests, they’ve had to chase the game, making a slow start on Wednesday night’s loss all the more inexplicable. Four relatively meaningless, empty goals with the game well out of reach should not have mattered in the end other than padding stats and perhaps egos in the end.
“We’d like to not be down 4-0 after the first, but after that we responded well and played with some pride after that,” said Miller in an expletive-removed assessment.
If, at face value, that statement is true, it remains not good enough. The Rangers remain a fragile group – one that’s vastly underperforming even with top stars like Igor Shesterkin and Adam Fox on the shelf – and digging out of the hole they’ve created for themselves seems to get more and more difficult with each catastrophic loss.
“I just think when you go through struggles the way we’re going through, our confidence isn’t at an all-time high,” said head coach Mike Sullivan. “When things don’t go the right way, especially early on in the game, it can affect the mindset of the group. That’s been our challenge, to find a way to find some resilience, keep a competitive spirit, enthusiasm, any adjective you want to use to try to put our best game on the ice. We take a penalty early on, give them a power play right away, they score on the power play and they get momentum right off the bat, it’s a tough way to start the game. We’ve got to find a way to find more resilience, recover and overcome that. We’ve just got to keep working at it.”
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