I can promise you that the Rangers do not believe that their problem lies behind the bench with the head coach. No one in the team hierarchy wants to point a finger at David Quinn. Nobody wants to have to make a coaching change.
But games like this, in which the Blueshirts took a full face on the Garden ice by losing 5-2 to a Devils team that has not played a game since January 31 and has only had one practice to prepare … well, such games could force club president John Davidson to ask some sharp questions about what’s going on here in hell.
Boy, oh boy, oh boy. It was so bad.
After a game in which the Devils owned the first and third periods and salted it away with three goals over the last 20 minutes to open a 2-2 game, Mika Zibanejad and Chris Kreider have some of the biggest culprits in the team breaks away 4-7-3 – no words at all.
“We lacked a bit of desperation to be honest with you,” said Zibanejad, last year’s 41-goal scorer. ‘The whole match we did not reach the level we needed.
“We need to find a way to do that.”
The Rangers were at the forefront in 11 of their 14 games or drew two periods. Yet they only won four times. It is not enough to indicate that the terrible start of Zibanejad or that Kreider’s negligible impact is mostly the cause of what helps the team, although few clubs can overcome the lack of productivity of its biggest guns.
No, there is more. The Rangers, who won 18 of 26 immediately after Igor Shesterkin’s promotion in January last year, forgot how to win. That’s more than having the second-worst five-to-five shooting percentage in the NHL. Or maybe there’s just less there than you see.
Quinn, who appeared depressed during his Zoom call to the media, as he had done through the two plus years of his tenure, was asked if it was about effort.
“Uh, yeah,” he said, looking just as beaten as his team.
If a team loses due to effort, should at least some of it bounce back on the coach? I will answer: Uh, yes.
All the improvements in the defensive zone – well, not during the last 20 minutes in which the Blueshirts went without the injured Jacob Trouba – do not look like a hill bean compared to the problems this club is facing.
“For a majority of the game, they hit us too much, kicked us too hard, worked out, won the majority of the fights,” Kreider said. “I mean, chances out there, we got away with the things we did well with.”
This is then the money quote from Kid K: ‘They wanted it more. This is unacceptable. ”
The Rangers were not undone in this one by the showdown. For the first time this year, they did not achieve a single male advantage. They did dominate much of the second period in which the trio Ryan Strome-Kaapo Kakko-Alexis Lafreniere owned the puck under the heels, but made no single mistake.
Hey, you know what? Kreider has not drawn a single penalty goal this season, including a delay in the first period. And Zibanejad drew exactly one draw while taking five, including an elbow from the second period he contested and for which he was in the field for Pavel Zacha’s power play goal.
Again, however, it is the individual trees through which the forest may not be visible. The only reason the Rangers were tied in the second game was because Shesterkin was a light loss of 2019-20 during the first 20 minutes. OK, Artemi Panarin was sidelined for the second consecutive game, but that does not even come close to explaining the club’s illness.
“A lot of things that happened tonight, you wonder why,” said Quinn, whose job it is not to wonder, but to offer solutions. “For me, we are in a situation where we have not won much yet. We need to understand the difference between winning and losing and what you need to do to do it. ”
Quinn is being called on social media all the time because of his failure to develop children. This is a ball malarkey. Kakko – perhaps the best in the club, and this is not meant to be a vague praise – has made dramatic progress over the past two weeks. Adam Fox, Ryan Lindgren and K’Andre Miller speak for themselves. Pavel Buchnevich, who was adjusted by the coach before the game, replied. His game has improved by leaps and bounds for Quinn. Lafreniere? No, I do not think the coach is responsible for the number 1’s one-goal and one-point output.
But such a game … well, if the bus goes off course, everyone looks at the driver. The Rangers do not want to look at the coach, but that is perhaps easier said than done.