Do you know what we’re talking about when we say that the Rangers’ tempo and compete on Monday were more ferocious than in the first-round series against Washington?
We’re talking about practice.
We’re talking about practice.
You couldn’t tell if it were May or December, you couldn’t tell whether the Blueshirts were on a seven-game heater or on a five-game losing streak, they had their work boots on and were going at it, one battle drill after another, crashing the net, everyone playing for keeps. All while keeping score in these mini-events that have driven this team since October.
“Competition,” Vincent Trocheck said, fairly beaming, when I told him that the team’s practice had been perhaps the fastest and most intense I’d ever seen at this time of year. “You give a bunch of competitors like we are to play for something, that’s what you get.”
That’s not always what you get. We’re talking about practice. We’re talking about practice after an 82-game season, a four-game opening round, and a Game 1 second-round victory.
We’re talking about a team that practices the way they play and plays the way they practice.
Eighty-seven games into this adventure and we are talking about practice because the Rangers, up 1-0 on the Canes entering Tuesday night’s Game 2 at the Garden, practice as well as any team I’ve covered. They go about their business the way championship teams do.
The Rangers may lose, they may lose in this round to a formidable opponent, but they are never going to lose because they are not well-enough prepared. That has been a theme that has carried over from the regular season.
Peter Laviolette has done a masterful job coaching a team that was begging to be coached up after its first-round defeat to the Devils a year ago that left the Rangers players shaken before a shake-up behind the bench. Laviolette became the third coach in four seasons following three years for David Quinn and two years for Gerard Gallant.
Questions were raised about the team’s mindset and the mindset of the core group that has largely been in place since 2019-20. A full year later, 55 victories, a Presidents’ Trophy, a Metro Division title and a first-round sweep later, just like Artemi Panarin and Igor Shesterkin, the Rangers’ mindset has become one of their greatest assets.
“I think you wake up in the morning and have a mindset of how you’re going to attack the day and there are multiple roads you can go down,” Laviolette said. “Some of them are good, some of them are not so good.
“For the most part they came to the rink every day and worked hard. I do think that’s a mindset and a strength of a team.”
The Rangers understood they would have elevate their game against Carolina after taking out Washington. They also understood that they would need to improve on their Game 1 performance against Carolina in order to maintain control of this series. The Blueshirts defended hard in their 4-3 victory but they probably defended a little bit too much and were caught at times with large swatches of open ice in their own end. No Ranger crowed after Game 1.
“I think for the most part we’re pretty honest. We try to be honest. They try to be honest,” Laviolette said. “I do think they’ve worked hard in practice.
“For the most part our guys go out there and compete every day and that sets a standard for how you’re going to expect it to move every day whether it’s practice or games. Credit to them, I said this to them the other day, credit to them, they bought into that.”
The work ethos has been apparent all season just as has been attention to detail. The Rangers are talented but they have developed an attitude that reflects a belief in themselves and their structure.
It still looks as foreign today when the Blueshirts go into their 1-3-1 as it did on Opening Night in Buffalo on Oct. 12, and the club could use some work on it, but their structure has also become kind of a shortcut for their culture.
And it is culture they endlessly work on and cultivate. Games can only be decided by bounces, but the Rangers are trying to leave as little to chance as possible.
Laviolette sometimes talks around questions, as the coach did initially when asked if he thought the club’s mindset was one of its greatest assets. But then he was asked again, yes or no, as if The Lincoln Lawyer were directing a cross.
“I do,” Laviolette said. “I don’t talk about it, you guys do. I’m not trying to make stories.”
The story is that during the second round of the playoffs, we’re talking about practice.