Islanders 4 Rangers 2
So maybe the Rangers were confused and thought that last night’s game at the Garden against the Islanders was an optional, like so many of their practices have been over the past month.
Maybe that would explain why only a handful of Rangers reported to their Broadway locker room prepared to compete.
“That was a complacent hockey club,” coach John Muckler suggested without prompting after his team’s insulting 4-2 loss to the Islanders. “Why? I don’t know why.
“The only thing I can think of is that we’re satisfied with what we did [but] we really haven’t done anything, yet.”
The Rangers didn’t do anything last night, that’s for sure, except insult themselves and the paying customers with a performance straight from the pages of early November.
With few exceptions — notably Czechmates Petr Nedved, Jan Hlavac and Radek Dvorak, who skated with purpose — the Rangers took the path of least resistance all night against an Islander junior varsity squad missing six of its 18 regulars. Stick-check here, flop down on the ice there, overhandle the puck here, turn away from a hit there; it was a display of shoddy, lazy hockey.
It was a display that threatens to cost the Rangers, because for all of their good recent work, for all of the effort necessary to have gone 11-5-1 in the 17 games preceding last night’s, the Blueshirts had only a three-point lead over the ninth-place Sabres before last night’s first puck was dropped. As they still do; three points with eight weeks to go.
“These are two points we should have had,” said Mathieu Schneider. “Hopefully we won’t be looking for them 25 games from now.”
Even barely interested, the Rangers were able to take a 1-0 lead at 7:37 when Hlavac registered his fourth goal in two games and 10th in 16, beating Kevin Weekes to finish a rush led by Dvorak and Nedved.
Even with the lead, even playing against a defense that came into the match with a total of 442 NHL games of experience — fewer than every individual Ranger defenseman other than freshman Kim Johnsson — the Blueshirts continued to play casually, as if without a care in the world.
“I think once we started the game off and got the early lead, you could see we were playing with an arrogance that we kind of felt we were going to win the game no matter what,” said Schneider, himself a culprit. “We just weren’t working the way we have been the last month-and-a-half, that’s the bottom line.”
Other than the Czechmates, every Ranger line was a bottom line.
Alexandre Daigle and Valeri Kamensky were dreadful; linemate John MacLean only a tad less so. Mike York and Adam Graves suffered, and so did Theo Fleury for the first 32 minutes before leaving the game with an apparent case of the flu.
With Tim Taylor home with the flu, Manny Malhotra centered the fourth line between Eric Lacroix and Mike Knuble (until Knuble moved up with York and Graves), but the unit was ineffective in its nine brief turns.
“We didn’t play with as much determination as we should have,” said a most disturbed Mike Richter. “Giving a good effort should be an automatic, but tonight for some reason it wasn’t. The Islanders played a good game and we didn’t, pure and simple.”
The Rangers entered the first intermission with a 1-0 lead … and were lectured by Muckler, who also talked long and loud to his players after the game had ended. The initial coach’s lecture made no difference to a team that, looking down on the Islanders from the exalted position of seventh place, must have suffered from vertigo.
“We didn’t react well at all,” said Brian Leetch. “We didn’t get angry or determined. It’s as if we expected that talk in the locker room to translate into good performance on the ice.
“It still takes action, effort and work.”
Lacking same, the Rangers were tied 1-1 at 4:18 when Jason Krog, alone to Richter’s right, finished a play that saw four Rangers wave at the puck. The Rangers did regain the lead when Dvorak scored on a Stephane Quintal rebound at 7:16, moments after the expiration of a power play that lasted 2:14 because of a clock malfunction.
Just over a minute later, however, the score was tied again, Josh Green from in front at 8:20, and exactly eight minutes after that the Islanders led 3-2 on Mathieu Biron’s goal off another nauseating display of shiftless checking.
The Rangers played with some urgency in the third period but, unable to beat Weekes, finally fell, their fate sealed by an empty-netter, thus losing their first game to a sub-.500 team since a Jan. 9 defeat in Carolina.
“We have to find the killer instinct,” said Muckler. “We don’t have it yet.”
What the Rangers have today is practice at Rye.
Mandatory.