They’ve been at or near the highest of the NHL overall standings for a considerable enough period of time to beg the query whether the Rangers just is perhaps the most effective team within the league entering the vacation recess.
It’s an unimaginable query to reply, isn’t it? Which implies that 32 games into their season, the Rangers just is perhaps the team to beat. Who expected that about three months into Peter Laviolette’s tenure behind the bench.
Saturday represented one other night on which the Rangers found the best way. It was not perfect. It rarely is for this team. However the team goes into the short moratorium buoyed by its 4-3 additional time victory over the Sabres on the Garden on Chris Kreider’s winner off Mika Zibanejad’s setup.
Butch and Sundance.
The Blueshirts go into the break with a very good taste, having washed the remnants of Friday’s unsatisfying 4-3 defeat to the Oilers right out of their mouths. That is something that this team does. It bounces back. It has a brief memory. It self-corrects. It’s coached.
The veterans who talked the talk on exit day by telling general manager Chris Drury that they needed to be coached up. They desired to be challenged. Now they’re walking the walk. They’re being coached up and living the life.
“They’re receptive. I do think it’s a self-awareness,” Laviolette said this week. “I believe while you played well and you played a very good game there’s a typical or a type of bar that you simply’ve type of set for yourself.
“Sometimes you’re under the bar and it’s possible you’ll win or lose, and there are sometimes while you’re not even near the bar. Self-awareness or presented to be self-aware on what we’d like to do to be higher, why it wasn’t successful, but I do think there must be a receptive audience to that as well.”
This will not be an ideal union. But there aren’t any perfect teams on this NHL. The Rangers sometimes bend but they don’t often break. Now that the Artemi Panarin-Vincent Trocheck-Alexis Lafreniere unit has cooled, with no five-on-five goal over the past nine contests, the Kreider-Zibanejad-Blake Wheeler connection has taken the baton and run with it.
There’s an extended approach to Tipperary, almost so long as it’s to the beginning of the playoffs. A whole season essentially lays ahead. The winter grind takes its toll. Which is one approach to say that it is going to be mighty interesting to see what the 37-year-old Wheeler has in his arsenal come April, May and June.
But when the winger maintains his legs, if the chemistry that appears to be developing amongst him and Zibanejad and Kreider flourishes, then the Blueshirts may not should go to marketplace for a right wing to play in that spot. If Wheeler can thrive under playoff conditions, the Rangers have the prototypical power winger to offset the most effective buds. And general manager Chris Drury can use his deadline resources elsewhere.
It is a can-do collection that is probably going playing barely over its skis. But there’s a grit there, exemplified by a child like Will Cuylle or a veteran named Nick Bonino. The team is greater than the gathering of its parts.
They check, with Laviolette using the Jimmy Vesey-Barclay Goodrow-Tyler Pitlick unit as an identical checking line. Saturday, the unit was up against Tage Thompson after Friday facing Connor McDavid after two weeks ago lining up against Anze Kopitar. The checkers role-play.
The Blueshirts can use some more size and menace in relation to the playoffs. They should have the option to regulate the web fronts at each ends. They will not be physical enough now. They will not be malicious enough. Drury has months to get assets that can make this a far more difficult team against which to play.
And the Rangers are going to wish the Igor Shesterkin of additional time with the intention to go the gap. Shesterkin flashed back to his 2021-22 Vezina season in making three spectacular saves in time beyond regulation before Kreider could strike. This — not the imposter who ranks between fifteenth and twenty first in nearly every statistical category — is who the team might want to win 16 playoff games.
It’s lower than halfway through the season. That’s true. Additionally it is true that the Blueshirts are 23-8-1 for a .734 winning percentage that leads the league. Are they the most effective team within the NHL? Perhaps not.
But just possibly they’re.
Christmas in December for the Rangers.