I’ll keep this one short today. Another poor result from the Rangers.

There are no longer “mistakes” in the game, rather just lack of effort for a full 60 minutes and if it doesn’t get fixed quickly this team will be staying in the basement of the Metropolitan division.

We have five guys…FIVE that have a positive +/- right now. The leader(s) of the pack there are Miller and Desharnais with +3. Fifteen other players are in the negative. Hank right now has a 3.15 GAA which puts him at 28th out of 40 total goalies that have played this year. If you look closer he is bottom five with goalies who have played more than five games.

All of these issues came into play last night. Poor penalty kill positioning leads to an early game goal and now we have to play from behind for the rest of the game. Shattenkirk/Desharnais tied it up a few minutes later with a great shot from the point, but it’s a moot point. Again because we can’t position ourselves well in the defensive zone we give Brock Nelson a wide open shooting lane in the slot to go down 2-1.

The third goal given up was very soft from Lundquvist in the early minutes of the second. I will say though while Henrik did give up a poor goal he did make some great saves throughout the game to allow us to at least stay in it. From there we moved to the third which was the only period where there seemed to be some urgency from the Rangers. They controlled the puck, and for the most part, the period was played in the Islanders end. A nice little Zucc goal from a bad defensive turnover by the Islanders and some ticky-tacky passing put us within one. The Smith no goal was the right call and then Hayes had a nice short sided put in to tie the game. Like I mentioned before Lunquvist kept us in the game with the last second saves in the third to send it to overtime.

Pretty standard from the Rangers in overtime, nothing really happening. Unfortunately going to the shootout in years past I would have felt extremely confident that the Rangers were going to walk away with 2 points. I can’t say the same this year. Lunquvist looked just a step behind in the shootout, and there was not enough support beyond the Zucc goal (which was extremely lucky to go in, in the first place). So again to recap, we missing full game effort and urgency from this team. The Western Conference Champs come into town on Saturday and we’ll see if anything changes. Maybe an afternoon game will actually get these guys going.

LGR