The reporter was trying to finesse the question. To Adam Graves, straight-ahead guy, there was no need for finesse. He interrupted and drove straight to the heart of the matter.
“If you’re trying to ask whether I agree with your perception that I haven’t been playing well, the answer is, definitely, I agree,” Graves said yesterday at Rye after an hour practice that was the Rangers’ sharpest of the season. “The question isn’t a surprise and it isn’t insulting.
“Without a doubt, I’m the first to admit that I’ve struggled. I recognize that I have to play a lot better than I have so far for us to be successful.”
So many new faces, and now an emerging party-line explanation for why the 4-7-1 Rangers, together for seven weeks since the opening of training camp, have played so poorly and with so little sustained energy for much of October.
“There’s a problem here but I see it as a problem that can be fixed,” said John Muckler, all but echoing comments earlier this week from Neil Smith and Dave Checketts. “Anyone who thinks that this could be put together in days or weeks is fooling himself, because it can’t.
“There are a lot of people on this hockey club that care very much and need all the support they can get. There are decent people [on this team]. I don’t see any reason why this won’t come.”
Muckler at the conclusion of practice chatted for five minutes on ice with Manny Malhotra, apparently explaining why he scratched the 19-year-old sophomore Sunday night. Malhotra’s lack of playing time and his relationship with Muckler is an interesting sidebar here, but hardly central to the team’s halting getaway. Because no matter how decent the individuals on the Rangers, no matter whether Malhotra is getting four shifts or eight shifts a night, the Rangers are going nowhere without an effective contribution from their first two lines.
Which is where Graves re-enters the story. The winger, very much a top-six forward anywhere in the league, has contributed little. Coming off a healthy 38-goal season that was every bit as good as the production implies, Graves has scored just two goals so far, and both on the power play. He has failed to score, registering just a pair of assists, over the last seven games.
More than that, though, he’s been unusually silent along the boards, in the corners and in front of the net, failing to win the one-on-one battles he’s handled routinely throughout his exemplary career. When the Rangers have been able to get the puck in deep, the opposition has been regularly able to retrieve it, then send it right back out again. The Rangers have been constantly caught in between, at least when they haven’t been caught turning over the puck at the blue line.
“We have a week between games here, and I think we all recognize that this is the time to look in the mirror and reflect on what we as individuals have to bring to the rink to help the team. We all have to ask that of ourselves,” said Graves, who skated yesterday on a line with Mike York and Todd Harvey. “I know what that means for me.
“I know that I have to be strong on the puck along the boards, and then do everything in my power to get the puck to net, to get to the net myself and create there. You watch the highlights on television, and almost every goal every night is scored from right around the net, guys jamming the net; pretty goals are really an exception now in this league.
“But that’s my game, anyway. That’s what I have to bring to the table. I have to do more, I have to create energy for the team by creating havoc around the net. That’s right up my alley.
“I’m the first to admit that I’ve struggled,” said Graves. “That’s no secret to me … or obviously to you, either.
“I have to play better-and I will.” *Muckler said he spoke to Malhotra because, “[he] was concerned about Manny as a person and a hockey player.” Malhotra, who from the start of training camp has somehow seemed off the game he brought to the rink as an ebullient 18-year-old year ago, appeared somewhat surprised to hear Muckler had said that but seemed to accept his fate as spare-part, fourth-liner.
“He told me he wanted to put me in situations where I could succeed,” Malhotra said. “I understand what he was saying.”
Malhotra, who hasn’t registered a point in 19 games so far (including exhibition matches), has received approximately the same amount of ice time he received last year, which is to say, not very much.
“I didn’t expect to play 20 or 21 minutes a game, but I thought it would progress a little bit more than it has from last year,” he said. “But we have a lot of veterans here who in order to play well need a lot of minutes.”
Theo Fleury, suffering from the flu, did not skate … Rangers are in Montreal on Saturday, then meet the Islanders at the Garden on Wednesday.