Rangers vs. Penguins: Dead Team Walking
From a hollow comeback to questions about leadership and effort, the Rangers are stuck in limbo until the roster starts changing.
- There's a glass half full way to look at that game, I suppose: The New York Rangers were completely outplayed for most of the afternoon and managed to pull within a single goal, albeit with an insufficient amount of time remaining to even have a legitimate chance at potting the equalizer.
- Then, there's the glass half empty version: The Rangers were completely outplayed for most of the afternoon and fell behind 5-1, rendering their late-game effort to climb back into the game in garbage time pointless.
- On one hand, it was nice to see some things, like seeing the Rangers actually kinda-sorta rally, and the orphan Alexis Lafrenière get on the scoreboard—twice! But walking away from that game with any takeaway other than just how straight-up bad the Rangers really are right now is olympian levels of self-delusion.
- A word on "garbage time." I can buy this concept in football and baseball far more so than in hockey. If you're up by enough points with little time left, you play second stringers and don't go full-bore on defense as you just want to run the clock out. If you're up by enough runs, you trot out the pitchers whose ERA looks more like the price of gasoline in California. I have a harder time wrapping my mind around the concept in hockey. Certainly Stuart Skinner wasn't utterly indifferent to surrendering a bunch of late goals just as long as they won. Certainly a retooling team like the Pittsburgh Penguins wasn't thrilled with three goals in the final five minutes, and two in the final 67 seconds, and probably want to demonstrate they can close out games effectively. So, I'll give this shell of the Rangers a little bit of credit for not completely quitting.
- But everything else? Putrid.
