It looks so easy when you are working so hard, feeling so good. The Rangers destroyed the Penguins 6-1 Saturday night for a third straight road victory, each one looking better than the last, each player looking strong as the next.
“We want to take pride in being the hardest-working team on the ice in every game,” said coach Tom Renney. “There are no weak links right now, there’s a great chemistry.”
Chemistry breeds winning, which the Rangers haven’t done in a long time because ice times and roles were out of whack, because those veterans who still got the job done well enough to keep the team in contention at midseason would inevitably break down. But winning breeds chemistry and, right now, this team’s confidence is surging. The Rangers seem to like each other, more importantly seem to like what their coach is doing for them.
It was easy to bury the last few editions of the team for being overpaid and undercaring, but in 2003-’04, practices Renney would run for GM / coach Glen Sather had drilled some selflessness and at midseason, the team was playing with discipline and purpose.
Problem was, if the Rangers were to save what was left of Mark Messier’s legs, they couldn’t practice enough. Plus, the real coach of the team wasn’t running it on game nights. With so few prospects in the system and so much money at his disposal, Sather wasn’t wrong to sign veterans, only wrong to sign some of the ones he did. But his biggest mistakes were following one bad coaching choice, Bryan Trottier, with an even worse one, Sather himself.
He seemed to worry that Renney, technically excellent, but with one short, failed, NHL bench job behind him in Vancouver, would not carry clout. But Sather has backed away and Renney has stepped up with selected benchings and ice-time manipulations that make sense and so far are getting the most of a hardly overtalented roster.
After Fedor Tyutin, who may have enough going for him to be a good No. 2, the Ranger defense is made up of fours and fives and sixes. While some youth has been blessedly interjected, so much of the plan revolves around keeping Jaromir Jagr happy that the yellow light stays on, even as he has lit red ones 17 times.
But the right coach, finally, seems, most important, to be the right coach for the team’s best player.
“Those 20 games I coached [at the end of the 2003-’04 season], we seemed to strike it off well,” Renney said. “And the Czech players we signed to complement him [Martin Straka, Martin Rucinsky] are really good guys.”
After so much failure, modest off-season signings, memories of other decent starts during seven seasons without playoffs, 11-5-3 seems too good to be true. Reality is inevitably around the bend with a losing streak, injuries, perhaps a whistle slowdown that puts more physicality back into the game, and, of course, other teams with a lot of new players, too, getting better as they go.
The bubble still seems far thinner than Saturday night’s margin of victory. Where is the adversity, Renney was asked.
“We have had a little,” he said. “Marty [Rucinsky] getting hurt, some bad games we’ve came back from. And there will be more adversity.”
Lots to prove for this team, which seems encouragingly interested in doing so.