Whether intentional or not, what Ryan McDonagh said was an indirect endorsement of his coach, Alain Vigneault — which is hard to come by now that these Rangers are 3-7-2 after another horrid first period resulted in a 5-4 loss to the Canadiens on Saturday night in Montreal.
“There’s good energy in here when we go through our meetings, and there’s good talk,” McDonagh said after the game, when he was the team’s harshest critic in a locker room that had very few players willing to answer for another desultory performance. “We’ve had the same lines and same ‘D’ pairs here for a few games, so that’s not an excuse. There is no excuse.”
Later, McDonagh added that it was “nothing about schemes and systems, that first period.”
Instead, the captain tried to direct blame toward the players, using damning phrases like there was a lack of “compete” and “battle level.” Surely it reflects poorly on Vigneault that the team has had such awful starts to games, but the question is, what can the coach do when his players, from top to bottom, are almost universally underachieving?
Vigneault didn’t get to 617 career coaching wins, good to be tied for 13th on the all-time list, by being a fire-and-brimstone type motivator. But it seems like this team might need more of that if they want to turn this season around before it’s too late.
Maybe the revamped group wasn’t exactly supposed to contend this year, with Lias Andersson and Filip Chytil representing a good future down the middle that just wasn’t ready while both first-rounders were still teenagers. But very few were expecting it to be quite this bad, with the likes of McDonagh and goalie Henrik Lundqvist — the two most relied-upon veterans — both struggling to find any consistency.
Vigneault has given McDonagh five different defensive partners already, and that might be clear now as a reflection on the captain struggling to find his game more than anything else. Vigneault said he “didn’t have a ‘D’ pair that could make a pass” on Saturday, and if the Marc Staal-Kevin Shattenkirk duo had been OK since uniting eight games ago, they were a mess against the Habs.
How much longer can Shattenkirk be shielded by the idea that he is getting “used to his surroundings,” as Vigneault put it? Soon, that four-year, $26.6 million deal — or at least the $6.65 million cap hit this season — is going to start looking less like a hometown discount and more like an albatross hung around the neck of the organization trying to rebuild around youth.
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While Vigneault incessantly juggled his forward lines, he had found one trio worthy of keeping together in Jimmy Vesey, Kevin Hayes and Jesper Fast. Yet Vesey was so bad in execution and so tentative making plays in the first period on Saturday that Vigneault mercifully gave him only five shifts in the second period and none in the third. Where was Chris Kreider before he used Tomas Plekanec as a shield to give Brady Skjei the game-tying goal in the third, and how does J.T. Miller — one of the team’s lone bright spots early on — finish the game without a single shot on goal?
And now the Vegas Golden Knights roll in for their first ever trip to the Garden on Tuesday night at 8-1-0, and that’s followed by a trip to Tampa, where Steven Stamkos and Nikita Kucherov are leading a 9-2-1 Lightning team that might be the best in the league.
“I think the next week is going to be a real big test for us,” Lundqvist said Saturday morning. “Tampa, Vegas, they’re all flying.”
And soon, the Rangers season might be flying off the deep end, and any endorsement of Vigneault might fall on deaf ears.