Panthers 2 Rangers 1 The wheels, such as they are, have fallen off. The Rangers head into the All-Star break a team desperately in need of rest, rejuvenation and reconstruction.
For the dagger-in-the-heart 2-1 Garden defeat they suffered to the Panthers last night sent the Rangers reeling into themid-season holiday with four straight losses (six in their last eight matches) and a record four games under .500, which is exactly the way they had started the season.
All of the uphill climbing since they started 0-4, then 0-4-1; all of the hiking since dropping back down to four under at 5-9-7 the day after Thanksgiving, it’s all gone for naught. The Rangers find themselves 11th in the East and, with a road trip to Washington, Carolina and Detroit coming up next week, in danger of being buried alive before the end of the month.
The Rangers battled hard last night, and skated with a sense of controlled, almost-playoff like desperation. They finished their checks and stood their ground well against a Florida team that seemed intent on trying to bully the Blueshirts right onto Broadway pavement.
But again, their inability to create anything resembling a sustained attack did them in. As did their inability to score on the power play – a new affliction that has proved fatal in the quartet of consecutive defeats that began last Friday against the Blackhawks, and continued through losses to the Canadiens, Senators and Panthers.
So cruelly, the Panthers got their goals from Pavel Bure and Bret Hedican, both of whom came from Vancouver in the trade the Rangers either could not or would not complete. Bure got his on a breakaway, slipping one five-hole on Mike Richter at 6:35 of the second during a four-on-four. And Hedican got the winner, stepping up to pick off an uncharacteristically ill-advised John MacLean attempted clear up the middle before blasting a 50-footer through traffic and over Richter’s outstretched right pad with just 1:43 remaining.
“I have to say that I feel sorry for our team. I thought we deserved better,” said a drawn John Muckler. “We worked hard, we competed well. We just can’t seem to find a way to score.”
Kevin Stevens got the lone Ranger goal, steaming down the right wing to beat Sean Burke from low in the right-wing circle at 7:47 of the third. But after tying the score, the Rangers never threatened to take the lead.
Muckler did what he could to jump-start an offense that has gone dead, one that has registered just three goals in the four-game slide to oblivion, and has been limited to two goals or less in eight of the last dozen matches. In a game in which each team went 0-for-7 on the power play, Muckler united Wayne Gretzky and Peter Nedved for a half-dozen shifts. But even that move failed to ignite the attack.
And so Nedved, matched against Bure’s line, goes into the break having registered two points (1-1) in the last 10 games while Gretzky goes in having been on the ice for four even-strength scores in the last 15 matches. And the effects of the knee injury that Todd Harvey sustained last Wednesday and that will sideline him for approximately another month continue to trickle through the lineup. It is no accident that the Rangers are 2-9-1 without their heartbeat in uniform.
“He brings emotion, yes, but that’s not really where Harvey’s injury makes the difference,” Muckler said. “Where we feel it is that we have to move MacLean up from his line to fill that spot next to Gretz, and we suffer because we don’t have anyone to fill MacLean’s role.
“It has an effect straight through that way.”
And now the Rangers get some time off before meeting the Caps on Tuesday. They get the time off to energize older bodies that have been asked to do way too much thus far, because the necessary youth isn’t there, or here. Last night, for instance, 30-year-old Brian Leetch, who has altered his game to concentrate on defense because the Rangers don’t have a solid checking center, got 34:08 of ice.
Into the All-Star break for the Rangers, who need the vacation. *There are dueling versions of why the Rangers never submitted a final offer to Vancouver for Bure. Vancouver GM Brian Burke insists that once Neil Smith told him on Thursday that the Rangers would not add Manny Malhotra to a package that included Niklas Sundstrom, Dan Cloutier and a No. 1, Burke told the Ranger GM that was it, as far as he was concerned. Smith, however, insists that Canuck assistant GM Dave Nonis told him on Thursday that Burke would be placing a call back to him on Friday.
The Post has information that supports Smith’s version; We’ve been told that in their conversion on Thursday, Smith and Burke discussed the possibility of the Rangers bringing a third team into the mix in order to get the Canucks a component they would have accepted. In other words, the call-back was promised for Friday to confirm that the three-team deal could be pulled off. The call, of course, never came.