You’ve heard it from Alain Vigneault whenever the Rangers have run into rough patches this season, including this past weekend when the coach used one of his favorite expressions between discouraging defeats to the Islanders and Penguins in which his team surrendered 12 goals on 84 shots.
“We’re going to have to simplify our game,” the coach has said much more than once.
Before a match Thursday at the Garden against the Sabres, Vigneault explained what he means by that.
“It’s making sure we have numbers back,” the coach said. “It’s making sure on the backcheck and in our zone when we have the chance to outnumber our opponents.
“And when we have the puck, north-south is better than east-west because there’s less chance of a turnover and when you do turn it over, it’s a lot easier to defend than when it’s east-west, you can’t gap up and you give up too much time and space.”
Quite simply, then, the Rangers played the part to near perfection in a 5-1 victory Tuesday over the Flyers that stanched both the bleeding and the three-game losing streak that had temporarily left the club on the outside looking in on the playoffs.
The Blueshirts did well getting the puck in deep and producing an effective forecheck when the opportunity presented itself. When it wasn’t, the Rangers clogged the neutral zone in what appeared 1-1-3 and 1-4 traps that frustrated Philly and prevented the odd-man rushes and glorious scoring chances that had become commonplace over the last month.
“It’s a five-man game for sure,” said Brady Skjei, who was one of the club’s five defensemen after Marc Staal left the match with a hip pointer following the first period Tuesday. “You see forwards backchecking and getting sticks on pucks.
“Those guys can stay above the forwards in the offensive zone and have good sticks and help out on the back pressure, it makes our job a lot easier. The forwards did a great job of doing that.”
The Rangers surrendered 26 shots, the first time they had allowed fewer than 30 since limiting the Devils to 28 on Dec. 9. They blocked 17 tries. And even though analytical measures such as “high-danger shots” taken off official scoresheets do not differentiate between shots from, say 15 feet, Henrik Lundqvist certainly does.
“It makes a big difference when you face shooters under pressure,” Lundqvist said. “They’re not coming in and looking at you without any back-pressure because [our forwards] are too far away. We were there all the time. It’s harder for them to get really good shots when they feel that pressure.
“You start in your own end and take care of business there. Your breakouts are better, your speed and timing are better. We’ve been talking about it for a while and I think it clicked [against the Flyers].”
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The Rangers also unveiled new line combinations in that one, including a Michael Grabner-Peter Holland-Jesper Fast fourth unit that was effective in a checking role.
But for all the changes in the sport over the years, there remains one constant. That is, the game essentially always can be distilled to a one-on-one competition. Not only have the Rangers been too loose in a structure that lately had resembled a house of cards, they have been wanting in the 50-50 plays that are so often determinative.
“We talk about keeping it simple every night,” said Rick Nash, whose two goals broke a 12-game drought and equaled his output for the previous 25 contests. “We’ve been making it hard on ourselves.
“The focus has to be on winning your one-on-one battles. That’s the mentality we need. We were going into the corners and coming away with the puck in our one-on-ones. That was a huge difference.”