On the whole, the Rangers have been far greater than the sum of their parts. On the power play, however, they’ve been far less.
Maybe someone might like to explain why, going into last night’s Garden match against the Caps, the Blueshirts were on yet another double-digit PP oh-fer (0-for-11 in victories this week in Buffalo and Atlanta), and why this team that was eight games over NHL .500 ranked 16th in the league on PP proficiency with a 17.5-percent success rate.
Someone like Tom Renney, perhaps?
“On one hand, I can’t really explain it, because even if you don’t have the talent I think we do have, you should be able to manufacture more scoring chances than we’ve been able to,” the head coach said following yesterday’s morning skate. “On the other hand, though, I think if you check around the league, penalty-killers seem to be a step ahead of the power play.
“I’m not suggesting we use that as an excuse, though. I think there have been times where we’ve gotten a little complacent and too predictable in what we’ve been trying to do, which, as everyone in the world knows, is to get the puck to [Jaromir Jagr] for that big shot on the right side.
“I think we need to change our look a bit out there and get a lot more movement from our guys. Another issue is that we’ve been guilty of looking for the perfect shot. And another is that we haven’t been generating enough speed off the breakout carrying the puck into the zone.”
Though Friday’s games, the aggregate league PP proficiency had increased from 16.5 percent in 2003-04 to 17.8 percent this season. Not only is that a rather insignificant boost given the traffic logjams in front of the net that are as much as part of the NHL landscape as auto gridlock in Manhattan during the holiday season, but even that slight increase can almost certainly be traced to the large number of five-on-three goals scored thus far.
“On the whole, the penalty-killers have figured out that even with the extra four feet in the offensive zone, there’s really no need to run around and pressure the puck at the point, and so you have players collapsing down low and making it very difficult for shots to actually get through to the net,” Renney said. “Your penalty-killers want to protect the house, so they come back to it.
“And then the reaction to that is for the power play to pass the puck around the perimeter looking for the open space and perfect shot.”
The Rangers generally send four forwards out on their first power-play unit, with Martin Straka lining up on the point opposite Michal Rozsival, the lone defenseman on the unit. Rozsival has one goal and four assists on the PP, the score coming on a back-door, right-porch tap-in on a feed from Jagr against the Hurricanes a week ago yesterday afternoon.
“Michal’s out there primarily because he’s our only right-hand shot [on defense],” Renney said. “As a staff at this point we feel that’s important to us, and that he has the best shot from back there.
“But we certainly have to do a better job of avoiding blocked shots and getting the puck through. There may come a point where our choice of personnel changes.”
larry.brooks@nypost.com