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“We just didn’t play our best. At this stage, we have to find a way to win games, no matter what it takes.”MIKE RICHTER
PHILADELPHIA – All of the deficiencies that combine to make the Rangers a below-average, below-.500 hockey team were on display here in yesterday afternoon’s 3-1 loss to the Flyers.
Because despite an admirable amount of try and a commendable willingness to stand up for one another in the trenches, the Rangers barely made the Flyers sweat – and this on a day where the Flyers were little more than average themselves. The Rangers rarely were able to come out of their own end off a crisp pass, and even more rarely than that were they able to generate any attack either off the rush or down low against John Vanbiesbrouck, who could have snoozed most of the way.
“We just didn’t play our best,” said Mike Richter, acrobatic in dealing with a succession of goalmouth scrambles throughout the game, yet beaten on a pair of 50-footers. “At this stage, we have to find a way to win games, no matter what it takes.”
What it will take for the Rangers to overcome the 2-5-2 mark they’ve posted in the last nine games in order to make the playoffs is merely a miracle. Now three games under .500 with nine games to go, the Blueshirts shuffled onto the team bus still six points behind the eighth-place Bruins, who were to make up one of their two games in hand last night in Toronto. Were the Bruins to go 5-6 the rest of the way, the Rangers would have to go 8-1 in order to overtake them and qualify for the playoffs.
The Rangers have become pretty much a one-line team – the Petr Nedved-Adam Graves-John MacLean unit. Yesterday, Nedved’s line and the newly created Brian Leetch-Mathieu Schneider defense pairing was matched against the Eric Lindros-John LeClair-Keith Jones trio. It was exhausting work. And though the Rangers held the Lindros line off the score sheet, the effort invested in checking obviously had an effect on the team’s most potent offensive combination.
Teams with legitimate checking centers and checking lines don’t have to tie up their best offensive lines with defensive assignments the way the Rangers have to. Add those ingredients, then, to those the Rangers desperately lack on their depth chart.
Nedved, who was terrific in the face of repeated attempts to intimidate him, was sliced at the corner of the right eye late in the game by Lindros’ stick for 12 stitches. After the match, Neil Smith called in no uncertain terms for 88’s suspension.
“How often has something like this happened with Eric, 20 times?” the GM asked and answered. “Sooner or later, somebody’s eyeball is going to be out there laying on the ice and Eric is going to be skating around, saying, ‘Geez, I didn’t know.'”
The Rangers actually gained a 1-0 lead on a fluke at 1:09 of the first when Kevin Stevens’ shot from the high slot glanced off a stick, popped high in the air, and then floated into the net behind a shocked Vanbiesbrouck. But the Rangers were not able to capitalize on their good fortune for the remainder of the period, one in which Darren Langdon, Chris Tamer and Rumun Ndur proved willing to stand up to large instigators Sandy McCarthy and Craig Berube.
And then the Flyers simply dominated most of the last 40 minutes, outshooting the Rangers 7-0 in the first 9:30 of the second and then by 7-0 in the first 3:30 of the third.
“We weren’t able to play three periods and the full 60 minutes,” said Graves. “It cost us the game.”
Valeri Zelepukin got the Flyers even at 4:33 of the second, beating Richter on a scorching 50-foot slap. The former Devil then made it 2-1, outmuscling Rich Brennan in close for a tap-in at 12:42. The Flyers got their third goal on a Karl Dykhuis 50-foot power-play screen at 2:58 of the third.
The Rangers were 0-for-5 covering 8:33 with the man advantage yesterday. They have pretty much stopped scoring all together, having manufactured two goals or fewer in five of their last six games. The one in which they got three came Monday, when a third-period score brought them within 6-3 of the Lightning.
Marc Savard hasn’t scored in 16 games and Mike Knuble has scored in three of his last 33 matches. Niklas Sundstrom has one goal in the last 10. MacLean hasn’t scored a goal in the last seven. Brent Fedyk, promoted for the second straight game to the third line, hasn’t scored in 18 matches.
Wayne Gretzky, who again skated between Sundstrom and Knuble, doesn’t seem at full strength, trying to step in after a month’s absence with the league tempo so high. With so little going for his team, John Muckler is going to have to think about re-arranging just about everything again
“We played hard and battled all game,” said Muckler. “There can’t be any criticism over how hard they tried.”
The coach is right. And with all that, still they couldn’t make a dent.