Rangers have ‘long way to go’ after opening-night clunker
Mike Sullivan learned a painful lesson Tuesday night as he watched the New York Rangers turn in a lackluster effort in his first game as their coach.
“My first impression is we have a long way to go to become the team we want to become,” Sullivan said after the Blueshirts skated off to boos from the sellout crowd at Madison Square Garden following a 3-0 loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins, the team he coached for the previous 10 seasons.
To get his first win with the Rangers, Sullivan must get better effort from his players when they visit the Buffalo Sabres on Thursday. There was no sense of urgency, no desperation in the third period when they tried to overcome a 1-0 deficit. They rarely made rookie goalie Arturs Silovs work hard in his debut with the Penguins, while Igor Shesterkin faced far more Grade A chances while stopping 27 of 28 shots before the Penguins hit the empty net twice after he was pulled for an extra attacker.
“I thought we had moments in the game where we were playing the game that we envisioned,” Sullivan said, “… but it’s not nearly consistently enough.”
Forward Mika Zibanejad, who had seven of the Rangers’ 25 shots, wasn’t as forgiving.
“They played hard, but I think we are looking at ourselves,” he said after the Rangers were outshot 15-5 in the third period. “Maybe the desperation at the end, but not much of a push.”
Rangers must regroup quickly after opening-night loss
If there was ever a night when the Rangers should have come out with fire in their nostrils, it was Tuesday. The Garden was full, the fans were pumped — and they were playing Sullivan’s former team, which missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs in each of the past three seasons.
Instead, they played most of the game as if they were in a fog. The Rangers did shut down longtime nemesis Sidney Crosby, but that’s about all they accomplished. They looked lost in Sullivan’s new system, which relies on zone coverage rather than the mostly man-to-man system former coach Peter Laviolette used.
“We’ll just have to keep working at it,” Sullivan said of his system. “We’re trying to simplify the process here, take some of the thinking out of it so we can hopefully overcome any sort of hesitation. But I think as we get more familiar, we should see a whole lot less of it.”
But all in all, he wasn’t happy with what he saw and knows that the Rangers can’t play like they did Tuesday and expect to get back to the Stanley Cup Playoffs after failing to qualify last season.
“We had opportunities to get on pucks and anticipate,” Sullivan explained. “We would have liked to have more pushback, especially on the 6-on-5. We’ve got a chance to keep pucks alive. We’ve got to dig in.”
Among the players the Rangers need to make some quick adjustments is defenseman Vladislav Gavrikov, their big free-agent signing this summer. Gavrikov partnered with Adam Fox on the first pair, but he often looked lost. According to Natural Stat Trick, the Rangers had only 22 percent of the expected goals with him on the ice at five-on-five — the worst mark of any of their six defenseman. Gavrikov did not record a shot on goal, blocked one shot and had two of the Rangers’ 17 giveaways.
True, this was the first game these 18 Rangers skaters played together. Chemistry, communication, and dependability should grow in the games to come. Miller played only one preseason game due to a lower=body injury. Artemi Panarin had a pair of injuries and didn’t appear in any preseason contests. So, there’s a baked-in excuse for the disjointed feel to the overall performance Tuesday.
Still, the Rangers had better find their game quickly, because the visit to Buffalo begins a three-games-in-four-nights stretch. They make a return visit to Pittsburgh on Saturday before hosting Alex Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals on Sunday.
“I don’t think it was our best,” Rangers captain J.T Miller said afterward. “They outplayed us for majority of the game. We had some good moments in the third, but I think where we’re trying to get to is better than what we showed today.
“On the other side of that is it’s the first game. I know we are going to be better.”
