Rangers 6, Stars 7

The New York Rangers dropped their third straight game to the Dallas Stars by a 7-6 score tonight. For a box score, click here.

There aren’t too many times where I’ve said that I was ashamed to be a Ranger fan. Tonight truly tested my patience with several areas with this team.

Forget that the Rangers came back in this game. It doesn’t mean anything now and it wouldn’t have meant anything had the Rangers somehow continued to score 5 goals to win that game. The problems wouldn’t have suddenly gone away.

The issue with Hank with me is very clear. He doesn’t trust his defense in front of him. His confidence in net has never been lower. Once he gets scored on once, it’s a long slippery slope to the bottom. You watched it happen in Montreal last week. And it happened again tonight.

There is no one person you could blame this on. Klein is having is worst season as a Ranger by far. Girardi for all his faults is just a bottom pairing defenseman at this point in his career, still playing 18-20 minutes a night. Holden was a misguided signing from the beginning. McDonagh has had a very, very pedestrian season for his standards and that’s regardless of who his defensive partner was. We screamed from the rooftops on the blog last summer that the defense was in need of a major overhaul. It didn’t happen. And now you see why I was so adamant about it.

Even more ashaming was the crowd at MSG giving it to Lundqvist for making routine saves after things got tough for him. For everything that man has done for this franchise over the last 11 years and to throw him under the bus during one the worst stretches of his career is embarrassing.

Lastly for this recap, the last time I felt this poor about a Rangers team was when Tom Renney got fired. It has gotten that low for AV that I believe he should be on the hotseat. I haven’t doubted for a second this season that he and Gorton are on the same page regarding personnel and how it’s to be used. AV’s usage of Clendening has been putrid. I don’t believe for a second that Holden was the best player available for the NYR defense over the summer and he wasn’t meant to take on the minutes he’s received either. AV needs to stop trying to put square pegs in round holes, in his defensive structure and dividing the ice time among his defensemen. The 2016-17 season is rapidly approaching to the point where a postseason run would no longer be salvageable.

The Rangers next game is on Thursday in Toronto.