1. Last night… Yes, it was an off-night for Henrik Lundqvist. He has to occasionally remind us that he is, in fact, human. Worried about long term? Absolutely not. Especially with this defenseless team that he has in front of him. Over the last couple seasons, I’ve subscribed to the fact that the best defense is a good offense. In today’s hockey metagame, having a good offense doesn’t necessarily mean scoring 5 goals almost every night out like the Rangers did for most of the month of October. Having a good defense is playing with the puck for as long as humanly possible. The Rangers do not do this very well. In fact, they are among the worst at it.
2. Proof? Here are some numbers:
Courtesy of Hockey Reference, this is Corsi events (shot attempts) against at even strength heading into last night’s game against Buffalo. This number has to be significantly better if the Rangers want to improve. Lundqvist can certainly keep many pucks out of his net but he can’t save them all, especially at the rate the Rangers are continuing to allow.
3. The Rangers claim to have taken a page from the Penguins’ playbook, stacking their forward group with scoring talent everywhere. The page they missed however, were the puck movers on defense. Letang, Maatta, Dumoulin, deadline pickup Justin Schultz can all make a solid first pass out of the defensive zone. Can anyone on the Rangers do this? McDonagh can, assuming he doesn’t ice the puck in the process. Klein can’t. Neither can Girardi or Holden. We’ve often watched Skjei skate the puck himself across three lines to tilt the ice back in the Rangers favor. Not even worth mentioning Clendening anymore unless AV is going to give the guy a chance. The Rangers puck movement from the back end is so bad, the defensemen are lofting the puck over opposing forecheckers out of the defensive zone, in hopes of someone like Kreider or Grabner to win a battle and force the play the other way. It’s not a good brand of hockey.
4. I had been casually following the CBA talks over in Major League Baseball, which ended Wednesday night with an agreement between the owners and players union on a new CBA which runs for another 5 seasons pending ratification. Why might you ask? Because the NHL and NHLPA already seem to be running down that road of mistrust that plagued baseball so long ago with NHLPA Director Donald Fehr at helm of the baseball players union at the time. On Wednesday, Darren Dreger told NBCSN that the NHLPA was likely to deny Gary Bettman’s informal offer of sending the players to the Olympics in both 2018 and 2022 in exchange of extending the current CBA three more seasons. A big reason for this continues to be the escrow issue that is plaguing locker rooms across the NHL, with the players’ paychecks cut 15.5% right off the top at least for the beginning of this season to account for HRR shortfall, primarily because of a strong US dollar value against a weaker Canadian dollar. Elliotte Friedman opined earlier this week that the league consider an escrow cap in exchange players accepting limits on signing bonuses which has soared among recent contracts that guarantees signing bonuses get paid out even if there is a work stoppage. The end game isn’t in sight and I worry that like MLB 30+ years ago, it’ll be marred by work stoppage after work stoppage in very short order.
(Photo credit: Bill Wippert/NHLI via Getty Images)
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