Warning: Please take what you are about to read in stride.
Coming into this season, the New York Rangers were at the top of everyone’s power rankings. The pundits out there, at least in most outlets, picked them to win the Stanley Cup. With that said, this writer wrote the following words about the Rangers at the start of the season:
“On the surface, the Rangers have the makings of a dominating team, however much will be riding on the health of their top players. The Rangers struggled as the regular season transitioned into the playoffs, with a sub-par Ottawa Senators side and a fish-out-of-water Washington Capitals squad both took them to seven games. One injury on this squad could be the difference between contender and pretender in this sprint to Lord Stanley’s Silver Chalice.”
It turns out that injury had nothing to do with one on the surface, but one of the heart.
After sputtering at the start of the season with blind passes, and an apparent non-commital policy to responsible team defense, they turned to the one guy who repeatedly showed up night after night, with very little support from his team mates. That player is their Vezina finalist goaltender Henrik Lunqvist.
Lundqvist has come under fire from irrational Rangers fans gathering in public for not being a big game goaltender. I could not disagree more. Not that I know anything about basketball, but I know when I hear about good athletes, and my guess it’s the same New York sports fans that are calling for the trade/public execution of Carmelo Anthony.
Here’s fact: Lundqvist has won championships in every level he has played in, the biggest of which was a surprise Olympic Gold Medal. For 8 NHL seasons, Lundqvist kept these Rangers in games that they should have lost, and was the deciding factor, often very quietly, in many of the Rangers’ regular season wins. It’s no surprise that seven out of the eight years Lundqvist has played in the NHL, his team has made the playoffs. He’s ALMOST 8 for 8, and would have been if then Ranger Olli Jokinen could have put the puck in the net in the final shot of the 2009-2010 regular season.
Here’s another tidbit: Lundqvist is going into the final year of his contract. When asked on break-up day about negotiating an extension, he began to talk about his time with the Rangers in the past tense. Everyone around the team knows that Lundqvist’s drive to win a Stanley Cup is great. If he doesn’t sign an extension, or chooses to hit the open market during the summer of 2014, it is only because he does not feel that he can win a Cup with a Rangers organization that once again seems to be in a state of flux.
In these playoffs, Lundqvist has given his team the best chance to win in almost every single period of play. I can think of maybe four periods, only two in this round, where Lundqvist’s play has been sub-par. Can the rest of his team mates claim that?
Brad Richards came into these playoffs with a heap of questions to answer. After playing mostly ineffective hockey for most of this season, he seemed to come on in the last few weeks of April. His rejuvenation and redemption was short-lived, however. He seemed to stop playing hard after the first game of round 1 versus the Caps. In game 4 against the Bruins, an elimination game, he was a healthy scratch. His ice time was drastically reduced, playing anywhere from 5 to 8 minutes a game. He clearly lost Coach Tortorella’s confidence in all areas, and has not been able to get it back. His absence from the game 4 and 5 rosters is most likely, and not surprisingly, a precursor to a buy-out.
About the coach; towards the end of these playoffs, it seemed that his players stopped buying what John Tortorella has been selling. The scratch of Brad Richards, a surprise to everyone inside the locker room, was a good indicator of that. The shock of that can sometimes wake a team up, but sometimes it doesn’t matter. Either way, it clearly is a weather vane for how much control a coach has of his club, and clearly Torts’ control has waned.
Coach Tortorella seemed flummoxed toward the end of the Rangers’ short playoff run, and made some questionable roster moves. For instance, choosing Roman Hamrlik to replace the injured and under-valued Anton Stralman instead of a young player like Dylan McIlrath simply boggles the mind.
Richards and Tortorella cannot shoulder all the blame here, however. The Rangers acquired Rick Nash during the off season in an attempt to solve some of the scoring woes that troubled them in the prior season and playoffs. To do that, they had to trade away much of their depth, and in effect had to rebuild the bottom half of their roster. Nash, who was red hot during the season, simply did not produce in these playoffs, only managing a single goal. Now, there were rumors about the health of Nash’s knee and his wrist, but in the playoffs EVERYONE is playing with injuries, and it’s how you overcome those setbacks that becomes stuff of legend.
The list of questions goes on. And with four major contributors all up for restricted free agency (Carl Hagelin, team points leader Derek Stepan, top tier d-man Ryan McDonagh, and Mats Zucarello), GM Glen Sather will have some tough decisions to make about his entire staff. Needless to say, the Rangers have a lot of ground to cover before they restore the BELIEVE attitude that surrounded them coming into this season, and it all breaks down, once again, to a matter of the heart.
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