Vincent Trocheck called it an issue of pride, and it was hard for Rangers coach Mike Sullivan to disagree.
Sullivan didn’t dispute Trocheck’s assessment following Sunday’s 2-1 loss in Nashville, dropping the team to 0-6-1 this season in the second game of a back-to-back.
“Well, it’s disappointing because we had a couple of really high-character wins the last couple of games and these guys have worked extremely hard,” Sullivan said after the middling Rangers fell to 18-16-4 overall entering Tuesday’s road game against the Capitals. “We knew this was gonna be a tough game going into it, but it doesn’t make any excuses for the lack of execution.
“I think there’s gonna be points in the schedule where every team’s gonna play against the schedule a little bit. This was gonna be one of them for us. … I just didn’t [think] we were sharp from the drop of the puck. I shouldn’t say that. I thought the first few shifts we had, I thought we had a pretty decent start, but it didn’t last long.”
Sullivan’s primary gripe was a lack of execution and crispness by his team, but he also thought it was a wasted “opportunity for some guys with a depleted lineup,” without injured captain J.T. Miller and ill forwards Matt Rempe and Gabe Perreault. The late scratches of the latter two forced the Rangers to dress 11 forwards and seven defensemen.
“I think that’s some of the silver lining in something like this, and of course we don’t want to play with a depleted lineup, but when you do, it provides opportunities for guys to play some more significant minutes and a more prominent role,” Sullivan said. “And it provides others that are in the lineup to elevate their games to try to help us have success.
“But we just didn’t execute. We didn’t go tape to tape. We were late everywhere. When you have these nights, I think you gotta recognize how to manage the game. You can’t beat yourself. You gotta manage the puck. You gotta make sure you force them to play goal line to goal line. You can’t give them easy offense. We gave them easy offense. We didn’t manage the puck. We didn’t make any plays. We made high-risk plays and turned into a track meet. It’s not a recipe for success. … It’s hard to play that way. You’re chasing the game.”
As Sullivan noted, part of the disappointment was that the Blueshirts had shown some mettle in winning their previous two games, an overtime win last week in St. Louis and a shootout decision over the Flyers on Saturday night at MSG.
“Definitely, when you’re on a back-to-back you want to make sure you’re coming out and making sure that you’re on top of them early. And I thought we had a good start,” defenseman Braden Schneider said. “We just lost it a little. And they ended up coming back at us in the second half [of the game], for sure.
“I think we just weren’t executing at the level that we wanted to. I think we had our opportunities, and we either didn’t bear down or we could have done a better job, especially coming out of our zone and things like that. I think we just made it a little harder than we needed it to be.”
Asked why he believed the Rangers showed a lack of pride in the game, Trocheck bluntly added that they “looked f–king dead.” The Predators, it should be noted, also played the previous night in a win over the Maple Leafs.
“We gotta take advantage of these types of nights when we don’t have it,” Mika Zibanejad added. “It’s been a lot this season when we win when we have our ‘A’ game, and it’s working for us.
“But we have to find a way to win games when we’re not at our best, either, especially when our goalies are giving us a chance to do so. We have to find a way to do it. That’s the thing that kind of stands out.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
