Seth Rothman, Inside Hockey
In a season where five percent of the playing personnel has slightly more than 25 percent of the goals scored, it’s become a valid question to ask: Does Rangers' coach John Tortorella have the personnel required to win games?
Or are the Rangers, as a collective group of athletes, incapable of even making the playoffs?
“We can’t be satisfied with generating scoring chances,” said Tortorella after his team did everything but score in a 2-1 overtime loss to Carolina Saturday. “We have to start scoring goals. We defend again. We held them to single digits chances against. It is something we have worked on. We generate some offense but we simply don’t score. You try to stay patient but the bottom line is that we have to start scoring in these type of games.”
But so far, they haven’t.
Through 41 games, only one player has consistently scored for New York.
Marian Gaborik has a league-leading 27 goals this season, and is on pace to tie the all-time Rangers record for goals in a season, currently held by Jaromir Jagr, who set the mark of 54 in 2005-06.
After Gaborik’s 27, the next leading goal scorer on this Rangers team is Vinny Prospal, who has only eight.
Except for the Magnificent Marian, no one on this team is scoring, and Tortorella has no idea why. But it’s not his fault. While he had plenty of input on the Rangers' offseason moves, he was hamstrung by GM Glen Sather’s untenable and unmovable contracts. The albatross contracts to Wade Redden, Michal Rozsival and Chris Drury have this team in salary cap purgatory where they will stay for the foreseeable future.
The lone bright spot for the Rangers offensively has been the power play, but as Tortorella said after the game Saturday, there’s too much pressure put on the power play because the team can’t score five-on-five. Of the Rangers 106 goals this season, 31 of them (29.2%) have come on the power play.
“Our power play has been pretty good. It has been pretty good,” Tortorella said. “When you’re not scoring five-on-five, it has to be very good all the time. That puts a lot of pressure on that special team. There is so much pressure on that because we’re not burying our even-strength chances.”
The Rangers have only scored 69 goals either five-on-five or four-on-four. That’s an average of 1.68 goals per game. That is simply not going to get it done. Scoring 1.68 goals a game is not going to win hockey games in the National Hockey League.
Overall, the Rangers are scoring 2.58 goals a game — that’s not going to get it done either.
“Hopefully something clicks here, someone finds some confidence and scores one or two,” said Tortorella. “We’re right down to a fine line — a mistake, it’s in the back of our net and we lose a hockey game where I think we should have been ahead, we shouldn’t have even gone to overtime.”
Over the last couple years, the Rangers have been around this same spot at the halfway mark — not in the playoffs, but not out if it, only to get hot in February and March and storm their way in.
Well, because of the Olympic break, January is this season’s February. They have 21 games to go before the break. If they don’t figure out how to score even-strength goals in those 21 games, it’s going to be a long march to the morgue for this year’s incarnation of the New York Rangers.
Now is the time to figure out how to find mesh, not the post or the goalie’s equipment. If they don’t, the Rangers’ noses will be pressed up against the glass as spectators when the NHL starts its playoffs in April.
