We know all about the blown leads and missed opportunities in Ottawa, and we all can identify the players who had disappointing rounds.
But for me, the larger issue management must address is the emotional void with which the Rangers took the ice for Game 6, when the series and a trip to the conference finals still were right there in front of them.
This wasn’t the first time in a potential elimination game at the Garden in which the Blueshirts came out flat, or have you forgotten the Game 7 shutdown defeat to the Lightning in the 2015 conference finals?
The Rangers are a team predominantly comprised of low-key, buttoned-down, Type-B personalities. There are too many of them for that to be just by happenstance and not by design.
And they’re playing for a low-key coach who delegates authority to the room and isn’t into the type of inspirational speeches delivered by coaches in the movies played by Kurt Russell, Gene Hackman and Billy Bob Thornton that wound up on the video screen of the MSG scoreboard on Tuesday.
The mix creates a placid environment. The Rangers could use a heaping dose of emotion injected into the equation. They need some fire. They need to alter the dynamic as much as they need to adjust the personnel.
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General manager Jeff Gorton goes into the offseason with a…
I can’t give you the name of the player or combination of players who would do that for the Rangers. But as much as Jeff Gorton is charged with fixing the defense, the general manager must also find a Type-A personality or two to infuse this team with more passion.
And a Type-A personality or two who can play, let’s be clear about that. This isn’t about bringing in knuckleheads to shake things up. It is about overseeing a transfusion here for a team that needs new blood.
The addition of rookies Jimmy Vesey, Brady Skjei and Pavel Buchnevich did change the regular-season dynamic to a certain degree. The team did distinguish itself from the 2015-16 team and the ones that came before it. This season was distinct from the five or six that preceded it, and that was by design of the leadership group.
But the playoffs somehow seemed same old, same old. The kids, perhaps organically, were less visible. The old guard emerged. And after Games 1 and 2 merged into Game 5, Game 6 happened. A passive elimination-game performance on home ice ensued. And the Rangers were done.
The Rangers who conversed with the media on Thursday’s breakup day at the practice rink all allocuted to their own and the team’s playoff crimes. Derek Stepan said he felt as if he were in quicksand, explaining the more he pushed, the more he sank. Sad to see and sad to say, he was a wreck in Game 6, paralyzed after doing too much analyzing.
Ryan McDonagh, the captain, acknowledged his three inferior games to close out the playoffs by saying he got into trouble by trying to do too much. Truth is, for whatever reason, Captain McDonagh seemed to get caught up trying to be Ottawa’s Captain Erik Karlsson, when being himself would have been plenty good enough.
The Rangers need to turn it over. Not burn it down. Not throw out the baby with the bath water. But remodel around a sound foundation of veterans plus a half-dozen younger guys — including Skjei, Vesey, Buchnevich, Mika Zibanejad, J.T. Miller and Chris Kreider, who should be better and make more of an impact next season.
Responsibility can’t be given, it must be earned. That is understood. But at the same time, Vigneault must be willing to grant this next generation a greater opportunity to lead and play the most important minutes instead of reflexively falling back on the leadership group. If that means Gorton must excise some veterans so Vigneault essentially has no other choice, then maybe that is what the general manager will have to do this summer.
Someone must address the power play, which went 3-for-39 in the playoffs. Someone must address the defense. But someone must address the emotional disconnect that has taken hold of this vanilla team, which has won one playoff series the past two years.
And that someone is Gorton, the general manager who inevitably will have to hurt the feelings of some of the best and most successful Rangers in franchise history by moving them out in order to allow for more breathing room for the next generation … and for a player or two who will breathe fire.