(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

Alain Vigneault has an interesting theory for why the New York Rangers blew another late lead on Saturday.

“Maybe the guys didn’t know their goaltender was coming (out,) but it was less than two minutes and (Ottawa’s) down by a goal,” he told reporters after the Rangers once again conceded an extra-attacker goal and ended up losing in overtime.

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“Should expect it, but maybe they got caught there not knowing the goalie was out.”

Allow me to advance a theory of my own: Regardless of whether his own players could see the 180 or so feet down to the other end of the ice, or correctly count the six Senators skaters furiously trying to put another late puck past Henrik Lundqvist, it was actually Vigneault who put his team in a position to fail.

Again.

Take a look at the damn box score, man. Senators on the ice, in numerical order: Dion Phaneuf, Kyle Turris, Clarke MacArthur, Derick Brassard, Erik Karlsson, Mike Hoffman. These are the big guns. Guy Boucher puts that group over the boards when he absolutely, positively needs a goal.

Now look who the Rangers had on the ice, in numerical order: Tanner Glass, Marc Staal … actually, let’s just stop it right there. These are absolutely two of the worst players on the Rangers roster, unequivocally.

I’ll put this as simply as I possibly can. Ottawa attempted 60 shots at 5-on-5, in a little more than 66 minutes. Only 10 of those attempts were from “high-danger areas.” In only 16:38 of those minutes, Staal was on the ice for more than a third of those attempts and half of those high-danger chances. It will surprise no one on earth to learn that he was the guy who blew it on the game-tying goal in this one.

As for Glass, he had perhaps the best game you could possibly expect out of a player with his, uhh, skillset. And he still got outscored 2-0 at full strength (including the game-winner with Ottawa’s top players on the ice), to say nothing of being on the ice for the tying goal. Turns out, he’s not the kind of guy you want on the ice in high-leverage situations.

And sure, any coach is going to occasionally find himself in a situation where he has a sub-optimal lineup on the ice. Bad players are, after all, more likely to be on the ice when the goalie is pulled because that’s when the puck tends to get into the defensive zone and stay there.

Anderson was officially only out of the net for eight seconds (watching the tape, it seems only slightly longer than that. Moreover, Staal played 1:24 of the 1:58 before the goal, and that stretch included an icing, so he was out there a long time and the Rangers had few chances to get someone else, someone better, over the boards to spell him.

Meanwhile, Brady Skjei, who’s probably the Rangers’ puck-mover of the future, doesn’t leave the bench for the last five or so minutes of regulation.

But here’s the thing: Vigneault wants his defense-first defenders out there in late-game situations. Demonstrably.

Turn back the clock a week, when the Rangers blew another late lead — that time conceding not one late goal, but two in the space of 2:17 — because he wouldn’t keep Dan Girardi off the ice. In fact, of the final four minutes of the third period in a two-goal road game with the other team clearly pressing, Girardi was on the ice for a whopping 2:30, though some of that was after he’d already been directly accountable in blowing the lead in the first place.

And when the Rangers lost in overtime of Game 2 against the Canadiens, you’ll never guess who was on the ice for the 5-on-6 goal that tied the game with 18 seconds left. It was, obviously, Marc Staal. And he was, obviously, stuck out there for nearly a full minute before Tomas Plekanec scored.

None of this is to say Vigneault’s team played particularly well in Saturday’s Game 5, because they arguably served up their worst game of the playoffs, but you have to say part of that is because Vigneault gave Dan Girardi (41.7 CF% at 5-on-5) more than 23 minutes. And Staal (30.3 CF%) got nearly 20 minutes. And while Glass only played about 12 minutes — and again, drew two penalties by living in Chris Neil’s head — he shouldn’t be in the lineup at all.