Part of the difficulty for the Rangers with the strange opening to their schedule is their ability to stay patient. Now on another four-day break following Saturday’s first loss of the season, a 4-1 defeat at the hands of the visiting Oilers, the Blueshirts will have played just three games in the first 13 days of the season when they skate against the Devils on Thursday night.

Coach David Quinn wants to make evaluations for each individual, each line, each defensive pair, and the team as a whole. But he doesn’t want to overreact — it’s been just three games, even if it feels longer.

“We’re into Game 3 [Saturday] night, and I don’t want to have three different sets of ‘D’ pairings after three games. So I kept the ‘D’ pairs the same,” Quinn said after Sunday’s quick practice in Tarrytown. “Then I’m like, ‘Let’s give these lines a chance.’ I know our secondary scoring hasn’t been great, but let’s give it a chance.

“There were so many ‘X factors’ in that game because of the situation we’re in.”

Quinn is set to give his team off Monday, but then it’s two more practices before the Rangers head to Newark on Thursday night, followed the next night down in Washington against the Capitals. They’ve had quite a bit of time to work on details, but it’s hard for Quinn to really know what needs the most improvement when there have only been three games.

“Over the course of the game [Saturday] night, I was contemplating changing a lot of things,” Quinn said.

He does know that he wants his team to shoot more, registering only 21 shots against Edmonton backup Mike Smith. Having been offensively carried by the explosive top line of Artemi Panarin-Mika Zibanejad-Pavel Buchnevich, plus a great start for the power play, Quinn needs more offense from other places.

Rookie sensation Kaapo Kakko managed to get his first career NHL goal on Saturday after a really nice backhand feed from Ryan Strome, but Quinn wants more out of that second line, with left wing Chris Kreider now dealing with a minor lower-body injury. The third line has a little more bite now that Brendan Lemieux is on the left wing with Brett Howden and Jesper Fast, but hasn’t produced a ton, while the fourth line with Brendan Smith, Lias Andersson and now Greg McKegg was pretty effective in its limited ice time.

After Quinn said he basically liked the way his defense played on Saturday, he wants to see more from his forwards.

“You’ve played two games, it’s a 1-1 game, it’s just [that] I thought our forward group in general had a tough night,” Quinn said. “It was our forward group that caused a lot of the problems.”

Quinn said he is considering making changes for Thursday, but, again, that is still a few days away. There is just more practice between now and then, with not a ton of game experience for him to go off.

“When you have this many days off, you’re thinking about the same game for four or five days,” defenseman Brady Skjei said. “That’s what makes it difficult. But I think we have a ton of room to grow. We have a lot of things to work on still, and these days off are good for that. But on the other side, we’re looking to play some games and get back into the swing of things.”

The Rangers are doing everything they can not to use this scheduling quirk as an excuse for not playing well — but who can say they’re not playing well when it’s only been three games? With so many new players, they just need more games to get a proper evaluation of their team, from top to bottom.

And it’s difficult for Quinn to stay patient and not overreact to the things that have happened in such a small sample size.

“We’ve all talked about the schedule and how unique it is,” Quinn said. “We’d like to play more games, but that’s not the reason we can’t finish a game.”