Rangers vs. Avalanche: Is This Team Good-ish?
They hung with the NHL’s top juggernaut, Panarin stayed scorching, and Igor did Igor things. So, what exactly are these Rangers?
- For a number of seasons now, mostly after New York Rangers wins, your esteemed podcast ombudsman Charlie Vidal and I will text each other, "Is this team good?" Sometimes it's a very serious question. Sometimes it's facetious. Frequently it's somewhere in between.
- Now, having won five of their last seven games, I ask you: Is this team good? Or, at least, are they good-ish?
- I get that this may feel a little funny to ask coming off an overtime loss. But consider the competition. The Colorado Avalanche are an absolute juggernaut. They lead the NHL with 46 points and have only lost twice in regulation all season long. They have (as we will discuss more later) arguably the most dangerous player in the NHL right now. And the Rangers found a way rally twice in this game to tie it up, including in the waining seconds with the goalie pulled—something that for so long has been their kryptonite. And this just a few games after rallying late to tie and then defeat the second best team in the Western Conference, the Dallas Stars. That's not nothing.
- I want to be clear that my expectations are still limited for this team. I think we saw in that game yesterday that there is no way you'd expect this Rangers team to hang with Colorado in a seven game series. I still don't know that I'd bet on them in any given theoretical first round series, though having Igor Shesterkin in net does mean crazy things can and do happen. But while it's probably fair to say that Chip's "they're going to win the Metro and make the Eastern Conference Final" was far too optimistic, can we say yet that that avalanche of doom and gloom heaped on them for most of this season was also way too pessimistic?
