Though the Rangers’ sky has been falling over the past month, here’s a quick bit of perspective: When they come out of this three-day Christmas break with a practice on Saturday, they will be looking a schedule that still has 46 games left.
There is still a month until the All-Star game in late January in Nashville, the same place where the Rangers will resume play Monday night to start a three-game road trip. There are two months until the leap-year trade deadline of Feb. 29, when to-be unrestricted free agent defenseman Keith Yandle will either help the Rangers on another postseason push or be moved for complementary pieces.
So there are many decisions to be made, and much hockey to be played, before these 2015-16 Rangers can be labeled as anything. Right now, they are a team that desperately needed a break, both physically and mentally. Although they carried a 4-9-2 slump into this hiatus, the final note was a 3-2 overtime win against the Ducks on Tuesday at the Garden that created a least a glimmer of light in the weeks of darkness.
“This is a big break for us,” coach Alain Vigneault said after that game. “Our guys are going to enjoy it, and we’re going to come back focused and ready for a strong second-half push.”
Good news for Vigneault is it looks like the injuries that had compounded the problems on his roster should be pretty well healed for this trip, which continues with road games against the Lightning on Wednesday and the Panthers on Saturday, traversing New Year’s Day.
The Rangers sent down defenseman Chris Summers and goalie Magnus Hellberg on Wednesday, moves that were allowed during the league’s roster freeze because both had been called up on an emergency basis. That means one of, if not both, Kevin Klein (oblique) and Dan Girardi (knee) are ready to return to the Blueshirts’ blue line, and regular backup goalie Antti Raanta has recovered from his scary head injury suffered last Thursday in Minnesota.
Klein has missed 11 games since he strained his oblique early in a Nov. 30 game against the Hurricanes, while Girardi has been sidelined for the past four games with swelling in his knee after blocking a shot in Vancouver on Dec. 9 (though he played the two games immediately after). Those absences caused captain Ryan McDonagh to play on his off-side, the right, and moved Marc Staal up to the top pair, where he struggled before a much-needed assertive performance on Tuesday.
“We need the break,” Staal said. “Four days is going to be nice, for sure. There’s been a lot of hockey this month; every team has [played a lot of hockey]. It’s well-received, so we will enjoy it, decompress for a few days, and then get back out on the road for a big test for us.”
Monday will be the fourth game back for alternate captain and second-line center Derek Stepan, who had missed three weeks with two broken ribs.
When Stepan suffered that injury, getting boarded by the Bruins’ Matt Beleskey on Nov. 27 in Boston, the Rangers were the healthiest team in the league, having missed just four man-games due to injury. They were also 16-4-2, off to the best start in franchise history, which now seems like such a distant memory.
Instead, these struggles are at the forefront of the Rangers’ memory, bringing down the attitude and mood for a normally chipper team. They still have their sights set on a long postseason run, and though some shortcomings have been exposed, they are far from buried.
With so much still in front of them, it will be awhile until an objective retrospective can determine what has happened over the past month — whether it stands as a mettle-testing dip by a quality team or a harbinger of disappointing mediocrity.
“When we lose, no one is more upset than the guys in this room,” leading scorer Mats Zuccarello said. “But we have to stick together. We are a family in here and we work hard for each other.”