Rangers vs. Stars: Lone Star Scoreless
The Rangers took their 10th shutout loss of the season, but the Drew Fortescue situation is the real story. Was scratching him to protect team control worth the bad optics?
- If the New York Rangers had found some way to pull out a win in that game, that would have been the kind of disastrous win that Joe and I have talked about on the podcast over the last few weeks. The Rangers didn't play bad—the Deserve to Win O'Meter at MoneyPuck actually game the Rangers about a 60 percent change of winning that game—but it was Igor Shesterkin saying "screw your draft lottery position dreams in particular" that really kept the Rangers in the game.
- The wins where the kids were doing their thing were fine. Yes, as we've recapped here repeatedly, it wasn't good for the Rangers draft positioning. But you can live with wins when the Rangers clearly deserved to win, because the players they need to have emerge as legit players were doing that. Winning because Igor stood on his head and they eked out a 1-0 win were the worst case scenario.
- In the end, this was the 10th time the Rangers have been shutout this season. They have two more games to go in this centennial season, so even if we assume they don't score another goal, they'll still fall far short of the modern NHL record of 16 shutout losses in a season, by the 2006-07 Columbus Blue Jackets.
- While, yes, this was another shutout loss, it had a distinctly different characteristic than most of those early season shutout losses. After all, it took nearly seven minutes for either team to register a shot on goal. As Chris noted in the Game Recap, the game had a good pace but there just wasn't a lot of offense to be found.
- Jason Robertson is pretty good at hockey. We'll have a lot of time between the end of the season and the NHL draft to talk about how feasible it really would be for the Rangers to take a run at acquiring him. There's not just the question of if they can muster the assets necessary to swing the deal; there's also the question of if it realistically fits the Rangers' timeline.
- There's been some talk about how one of the ways the Rangers might make this a retool instead of a rebuild is deploying J.T. Miller to persuade all the member of USA Hockey Mafia he can to join the Rangers. I'm ... dubious of this plan. But it's also somewhat funny to me that in the last few games the Rangers have been beaten by two of the shunned members of Team USA—first Cole Caufield and now Jason Robertson. All while Adam Fox is still ticking along at a point-per-game pace.
