The pressure is on the New York Rangers to snap out of it. The team is 4-13 in their last 17 games and their season is spiraling out of control. The Rangers currently sit in last place in the Metropolitan division with 34 games played.
Recently trade rumors have surfaced around the longest-tenured Ranger, Chris Kreider and that has some of the fanbase up in arms. Kreider has 11 goals on the season but has just three points in his last ten games and has struggled along with other key Rangers players like Mika Zibanejad, who also has just three points in his last ten games.
At a recent press conference, Rangers head coach Peter Laviolette answered a question about Kreider.
“He’s an important piece to the team and we’re moving forward. We need him and everybody to be great players from this point out.”
In their last five games, the New York Rangers, who won the President’s Trophy as the team with the best record in the NHL last season have scored six goals. In their last two games against division rivals, the Hurricanes and New Jersey Devils, the Rangers are 0-for-10 on the power play.
“I don’t think one brush does it. You know it’s something one game, it’s something different the next game. We lose a 2-1 game to Carolina, they score a couple power play goals, and we don’t generate very much during that game in Jersey. It’s different every game; It could be defense, could be offense, could be special teams. But we’ve got to get past that and turn a corner. Coming out of this break, we’ve got to use it as a reset and move forward and head down to Tampa and win a hockey game.”
Rangers head coach Peter Laviolette described what his team hasn’t been doing lately that’s led to their lack of success on the ice.
“The last 3 or 4 games just haven’t possessed a lot of the puck in the offensive zone. I think that we’re not getting it there at times. I think that we’re making poor decisions with the puck at times through the neutral zone. I think we’re making poor decisions with the puck in the offensive zone when we just give it away. We just hope one to the middle and it just starts [the other team’s] breakout and we’re chasing things back to our end. And there’s different things that we go through and show and talke about with the team that can help keep us there longer while we’ve been talking about defense most of the year. The offense up until the last few games has been in the O-zone, we’ve been generating chances, we’ve been generating attempts but that’s slid in the last few games so that now draws our attention as well. We do look at things, we do make adjustments when we need to make adjustments and we have made a couple of big changes within the system this year.”
The bulk of the 2024-25 NHL season is ahead of the Rangers and they have the ability to write the script from this point forward. The man tasked with getting them ready to take on the rest of the season at this point is Peter Laviolette and he talked about how he views the holiday break of four days that the team just had.
“When you haven’t won games like we’ve had, you hope that that break sends you in a different direction and oftentimes it does. This is an opportunity for us just to clear the deck. I do think from a mental and physical standpoint to get away from it for a second come back in we have a good practice and we head out to Tampa and now we’ve got to follow it up with what we do on the ice versus Tampa Bay.”
The Rangers begin a road trip in Tampa Bay, Florida on Saturday where they will start with a 7 p.m. tilt against the Lightning. They wrap up their road trip with another tough test against the second place team in the Atlantic Division, the defending cup champion, Florida Panthers on monday. The road isn’t getting any easier and it’s high time that the Rangers find a way to correct their woes going into the second half of the season.
