With playoff berth highly unlikely, rebuilding Rangers are developing prospects
Rangers coach David Quinn looks on during the first period against the Winnipeg Jets at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 2, 2018. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The sprint to the finish line of the NHL season begins Sunday for the Rangers, when they reconvene for practice after their All Star break/bye week. At 21-20-7 through the season’s first 48 games, and nine points out of a playoff spot, the Rangers are pretty much where everyone expected them to be a year after announcing they would begin the process of rebuilding. The 2018-19 Blueshirts won’t be a playoff team, but they don’t appear to have a real shot to win the NHL draft lottery, either.
For a minute there, David Quinn’s club had fans excited. Their surprising 9-1-1 run from late October to mid-November had them in a playoff spot on Thanksgiving. They were 12-8-2, and folks were liking what they were seeing from the first-year coach and his young group of overachievers.
But reality caught up to the team, beginning with a no-show, 4-0 loss to the Flyers in Philadelphia on Nov. 23 that began a 2-5-3 skid that brought the Rangers back to reality.
Through an up-and-down season, however, the Rangers have shown grit at times, and they’ve dispelled any thought that they might go into tank mode to try and get a shot at Jack Hughes, the presumed No. 1 overall pick in this summer’s NHL draft. According to the website tankathon.com, the Blueshirts have a 2 percent chance of getting the No. 1 pick and a 6.6 percent chance of getting a top-3 pick.
Those odds may change after the Feb. 25 trade deadline, when general manager Jeff Gorton will no doubt again be unloading veterans to contending teams in exchange for draft picks and prospects. But James Dolan, the executive chairman and CEO of Madison Square Garden, promised to reporters in January on a trip to Las Vegas that neither of his teams would ever tank games. And Gorton had made it clear last summer when he hired Quinn to replace the fired Alain Vigneault that the Rangers would not be putting an AHL-level team full of 18- to 21-year-olds on the ice every night.
The organization’s top priority these days is to develop its young prospects, and Gorton didn’t believe putting together a team full of kids that would get blown out every game was going to develop anybody.
The plan, instead, was to have a few prospects developing at the NHL level, some learining at the AHL level, with the Rangers’ Hartford farm club, and some others getting their ice time and refining their games with their European league teams, junior teams or college teams. So far, everything would appear to be going according to plan.
Twenty-year-old Brett Howden and 19-year-old Filip Chytil have been with the Rangers all season, 20-year-old Lias Andersson has split time with Hartford and the Rangers, and 20-year-old defenseman Ryan Lindgren came up before the break and played three games with the club before going back to Hartford to continue to play during the break.
Meanwhile, 2018 first-round picks Vitali Kravtsov, K’Andre Miller and Nils Lundkvist are all progressing, if not excelling in their respective leagues. Kravtsov, 19, was the only teenager to play in the KHL All-Star Game and scored a goal. Miller, a 19-year-old defenseman, has 18 points in 20 games for the University of Wisconsin. Lundkvist, 18, leads all Swedish Hockey League defensemen 20 or younger in assists (five) and points (six).
As for the current Rangers, if the playoffs aren’t a realistic hope, and a top-3 pick is a longshot, too, then where does that leave Quinn’s bunch? Well, it leaves them playing the rest of their schedule, 34 games over the final 68 days, trying to win each without the incentive of a playoff spot as a reward for winning enough of them.
Quinn has pushed his players, young and old alike, to play hard and smart, and – with the help of star-level goaltending from Henrik Lundqvist and backup Alex Georgiev – the coach has squeezed all the points anyone could have expected out of the schedule so far. Points will be harder to come by after people like Mats Zuccarello and defenseman Adam McQuaid, and possibly Kevin Hayes, and who knows who else is traded in the coming weeks.
But Quinn has established a work ethic that should continue past the trade deadline. And when all those veterans leave, fans will likely get a chance to see some of the prospects they’ve been hearing about for the last year or so – a sneak peek at what the team may look like when the rebuilding is complete.
'Unforgettable Rangers'
Author Matthew Blittner has written a book, “Unforgettable Rangers,’’ a history of the team from the perspective of the broadcasters and media who have followed the team over the years. The book is on sale through Amazon’s website.
Colin Stephenson covers the Rangers for Newsday. He has spent more than two decades covering the NHL and just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
