Flyers 4 – Rangers 2
The legs are connected to the minds. Neither was there last night. And neither were the Rangers.
“We need to develop an attitude on this team that we have a divine right to win, and that that’s what we’re going to do every time we go onto the ice,” Brendan Shanahan said after the Rangers lost a 4-2 game to the Flyers last night at the Garden in which the Blueshirts were barely competitive.
“For some reason, even though we had won our first two games, we seemed surprised to be 2-0, and we seemed apprehensive about the start of the game.
“The Flyers were on their toes. We were on our heels. The Flyers were initiating. We were reacting. It’s almost as if we started the game thinking, ‘Hmm, we stole one in Philly on Saturday, I bet they’re going to come out really hard.’ For some reason we were unsure of ourselves.”
Be sure of this. No Ranger could have left the rink satisfied with the effort, never mind the outcome. The Blueshirts were outworked and out-thought from the opening drop of the puck. They were beaten to the puck, beaten to the spot, beaten on the scoreboard.
“I’m not happy one bit. Pick a topic – there’s nothing good about this game in any way, shape or form,” coach Tom Renney said.
“We never reached a battle level that was even close to Philly. We lacked the commitment.”
The Rangers generally like to match power and power, first line against first line. But last night Renney came out matching his Blair Betts-Marcel Hossa-Adam Hall checking unit against the imposing Peter Forsberg-Simon Gagne-Mike Knuble troika. The strategy worked as ineffectively as the team itself, with Forsberg and Knuble each scoring against the personnel assigned to stop them.
Jaromir Jagr struggled for the second straight game and, as if the admission were necessary, acknowledged that his surgically repaired left shoulder was not close to full strength.
With No. 68 unable to carry them; with Henrik Lundqvist merely ordinary in nets; with the power play still anything but shot-oriented from the back again; with Martin Straka and Michal Rozsival on the points, what else is to be expected?
And with Renney furiously shuffling his lines for the final 25 minutes, the Rangers looked discombobulated.
“It’s not going to be pretty every night,” said Renney, whose team lost the chance to open with three straight victories for the first time since 1989-90. “Sometimes you need to lose to get people’s attention.”
Shanahan, who arrived on Broadway after nine years in Detroit where the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup three times and the President’s Trophy twice, attempted to get his new club’s attention during the first intermission when he addressed his teammates.
“I had the feeling that we looked at the Flyers’ roster on the board in our room and were thinking how good it looked, but we have to understand that ours looks pretty good, too,” said Shanahan, whose second-period power-play goal is the only PPG the Rangers have in 17 opportunities. “We have to go into each game believing we have the absolute right to win.
“But sometimes it takes time to believe. This team turned the franchise around last year, it got its feet pointed in the right direction, but there’s a long way to go.
“And it gets harder before it gets easier.”