TORONTO — What exactly are the Rangers doing?
Maybe things have evened out a bit. Maybe they never were as bad as that 3-7-1 getaway under first-year head coach David Quinn. Just like maybe they aren’t quite as good as this run of 5-0-1 that continued with taking three of four points on a road back-to-back Friday and Saturday in Detroit and Columbus.
Three of those five wins — and a sterling record of 4-0 this season — came via the shootout, and what’s that really show about the quality of a team when it pertains to — you know — playing a hockey game?
“We’ve managed to win all our shootouts, and the way this league is structured, they give us a point for it, and we’re going to take them,” a smiling Quinn said Saturday in Columbus, with his team getting Sunday off before returning to action with a Garden match against the Canucks on Monday night.
So now these Blueshirts are above .500 at 8-7-2, in front of the free-falling Penguins for goodness’ sake, and full of some semblance of confidence that has been fleeting. But there are much larger questions that present themselves to general manager Jeff Gorton as this season continues to wind its way down a strange path.
Like how much do they want to keep winning and worsening their draft position when the future is still far more important than the present?
For what it’s worth — and it’s worth quite a bit — Quinn has his team playing hard every night. The Rangers make a lot of mistakes and a lot of jaw-droppingly bad mistakes that end up undercutting a lot of good work. They also go through stretches of games when their collective play falls off a cliff. Examples A and B coming with the putrid third period in Detroit, where they blew a 2-0 lead and lost 3-2 in overtime, followed by the 4:14 of game time in the second period in Columbus when a 3-1 lead turned into a 4-3 deficit.
Those lapses are somewhat expected from a team this inexperienced. Yet they have even shown moments of managing those mistakes — like coming back to win in Columbus — which is paramount for the mentality that Quinn is trying to instill, no matter who is here for the long haul.
“You’re going to make mistakes. That’s just going to happen,” Quinn said. “It’s how you recover from them and how you react to them that’s the key.”
The next big question is about the personnel who will be here for the long haul. Kevin Hayes is playing the best hockey of his career. He’s in great shape, he’s a driving force at both ends of the rink every night, and his skill is coming to the forefront with dazzling plays like the assist he made on Jimmy Vesey’s game-tying — or game-saving? — goal late in the second period Saturday. At 26 years old and set to be an unrestricted free agent after this season, his trade value is only rising. That, or each win Hayes helps create might convince Gorton the future could be sooner than later. Then what’s rising is the money and term the club will have to shell out to keep this Boston kid on Broadway.
Quinn said he hoped to have Mats Zuccarello back from his groin strain for Monday night’s game after the winger missed the two-game sojourn. But the 31-year-old Norwegian also is set to be an unrestricted free agent, and his value will come into focus closer to the Feb. 25 trade deadline.
Even backup goalie Alex Georgiev, the affable 22-year-old Bulgarian, is showing signs to be a potential No. 1 somewhere — it’s just unlikely to be here, with Russian prodigy Igor Shestyorkin readying to come over from the KHL next year and possibly play understudy for the remaining two years on Henrik Lundqvist’s contract. Maybe Shestyorkin goes to AHL Hartford for a year, and he and Georgiev then fight it out to be Lundqvist’s successor? Or maybe Georgiev’s trade value at some point this season becomes too much to turn down.
So where does that leave the rest of this season? Of course Quinn wants to win games, and so do the players. Of course Gorton wants his possible trade pieces to keep playing well. But the long-term plan is not changing, and so this head-scratching season marches on.
During warm-ups Monday night, the team is ditching the Blueshirts for camouflage sweaters, along with camouflage tape on their sticks. The sweaters and sticks, along with more signed merchandise, will be available for auction with the benefits going to the Wounded Warrior Project, a charitable partner of the Garden of Dreams Foundation.
This is the first of five scheduled nights at the Garden this season when the Rangers will honor the military. The individual honoree Monday will be U.S. Army National Guard 1st Lt. Louis Edwin Allen, who was killed in the line of duty while serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom. In his name, the team will donate $10,000 to Folds of Honor, a nonprofit organization that provides scholarships to families of fallen and disabled service members.
This is the fourth season the Rangers have held a “Salute Our Troops” night.
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