Have Rangers hit bottom after being whipped by Flames?
How low can the New York Rangers go?
It looked like they might have hit bottom on Thursday, when they played Swiss cheese defense, got middling goaltending from Igor Shesterkin, their best player, and lost 6-5 in overtime at home to the previously winless San Jose Sharks.
Coach Mike Sullivan upbraided his team afterward, saying the Rangers might have taken the Sharks for granted and that such a thing couldn’t happen again.
But it did.
If anything, New York’s 5-1 loss to the woeful Calgary Flames on Sunday was even worse. Calgary entered the game at the bottom of the NHL standings with three points, last with 15 goals in nine games (1.67 goals per game), and mired in an eight-game winless skid (0-7-1). But the Flames came out with fire, opening the scoring 1:42 into the game when Nazem Kadri beat Shesterkin, and added another by low-scoring defenseman Kevin Bahl before the 10-minute mark.
“You just can’t be OK with coming out flat. We’re in no position to come out flat,” an upset captain J.T. Miller said afterward. “Be in the right mindset, we’re ready to go. We got outplayed again in the first period. It kind of set the tone.”
Noah Laba scored his first NHL goal 10 seconds after Bahl’s tally to cut the Rangers deficit to 2-1, but the Rangers couldn’t get another puck past Flames goalie Dustin Wolf, who outplayed Shesterkin handily. His robbery of Mika Zibanejad on a second-period breakaway appeared to take some life out of the Rangers, who largely mailed in the third period.
A 2-on-1 break following a turnover by Zibanejad during a third-period Rangers power play turned into the first of two goals by Blake Coleman, who added insult to injury by scoring again with 5:33 remaining.
Shesterkin was not up to his usual level of play for the second straight game. But even playing at his Vezina Trophy caliber of a few years ago wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
Rangers continue slide with poor showing in loss to Flames
Sullivan cited the suddenly leaky defense, not his goaltender, as a major problem.
“We’re not at our best right now, and we’ve got to find a way to dig our way out of it,” he said. “I just think it starts with effort and just attention to detail on the defensive side. I thought for a lot of this year, we had done a real good job at controlling the defensive side of the puck and limiting, not only quality of chances, but quantity of chances.
“I thought tonight, the types of mistakes we made, they’re egregious. They’re really hard to recover from, and we gave them some pretty good looks as a result.”
Coleman’s first goal came on one of several odd-man rushes allowed by the Rangers, who’ve allowed 11 goals in their past two games after they surrendered just 15 in their first eight games.
Talk about a team springing leaks.
“It’s getting away from us because we’re getting away from a team game. For the majority of the year, I think we’ve — from a defensive standpoint — done a pretty good job as far as being hard to play against,” Sullivan said. “The last couple of outings, not so much. And it’s the same group of guys with the same concept. So we’ve got to do a better job, all of us as a group, and just making sure we get back to understanding what that game looks like.”
But it was the Rangers’ failure to “start on time,” as former NHL coach Mike Babcock would have phrased it, that forced them to spend the night chasing the game.
“There’s no excuses to come up flat. It sucks,” Miller stated. “This is not fun right now. We need to correct the starts. I think it’s becoming like the trend now, so we need to fix this now, on this trip. I mean, it’s a hard road trip, so we’ve got to be ready to go to start the game.”
The offensive problems are bad. The defensive issues are worse.
At 3-5-2 (.400 points percentage), the Rangers dropped to the bottom of the Eastern Conference after 10 games (though they’re just one point out of a wild-card spot), and the only teams with a lower points percentage in the League are the Sharks and Flames.
They desperately miss center Vincent Trocheck, who’s on long-term injured reserve with an upper-body injury. Their big guns, including Artemi Panarin and Zibanejad, aren’t doing the job offensively — and Alexis Lafreniere has one goal, three points and is minus-10. They’re 0-4-1 at Madison Square Garden, their worst five-game start at home in 82 years.
With visits to the Vancouver Canucks, Edmonton Oilers and Seattle Kraken in a five-day stretch beginning Tuesday, the Rangers can’t afford to have the bottom drop any lower than it already has. It’s getting late early on Broadway.
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