Colin Stephenson: Rangers' Will Cuylle gets a shot at center as Mike Sullivan keeps thinking outside the box
Rangers left wing Will Cuylle looks on before a face-off against the Utah Mammoth in the second period of an NHL game at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 4. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
The Rangers lost their best and most indispensable player, Igor Shesterkin, to a season-ending injury two weeks into the season. It was an unthinkably cruel blow, to be sure, but it’s not as if coach Mike Sullivan could throw in the towel on the season after six games.
So the highest-paid coach in the NHL went to work. Shesterkin being out was his biggest problem, certainly, but not the only one. Backup goalie Joonas Korpisalo already was out with a lower-body injury and wasn’t going to be back anytime soon.
So Sullivan was left with no other option but to play his No. 3 goalie, 24-year-old rookie Dylan Garand, and try to find ways to support him.
When it looked as if Garand might be getting a little tired from overwork, Sullivan tried starting 38-year-old James Reimer one day after the team signed him to a contract following a one-game tryout with the Rangers’ Hartford farm team. That didn’t work out so well, but Sullivan has kept trying whatever he can to improve the team in front of Garand with the pieces he has available.
One of those throw-stuff-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks moves was to try winger Will Cuylle at center on the third line in Tuesday’s 3-1 win over the St. Louis Blues. Cuylle had never played center before — not in the minor leagues, not even in junior hockey or minor hockey — but the coach played a hunch.
“I think Will has all the attributes to play the position,” Sullivan said at Tuesday’s morning skate. “He takes a lot of faceoffs anyway, so he’s comfortable in the faceoff circle, and he’s pretty good in the faceoff circle.
“He understands how we play in our own end, playing down low. There’s more of a responsibility on the center [in the defensive zone] than there is on the wings, but he understands it. He’s comfortable with it . . .
“We’ll see what we get, but we think potentially that he’s a guy that we could utilize there depending on what our team needs are at any given time.”
For one game, it seemed to work out OK. Cuylle’s line — with wingers Oliver Bjorkstrand and Eeli Tolvanen — spent a lot of time pinned in its own end early on, but it seemed to get better as the game went on. The trio combined on a crucial insurance goal that doubled the Rangers’ lead to 2-0 midway through the third period.
Cuylle started the play when he intercepted a puck in the offensive zone and passed to Tolvanen on the right. Tolvanen relayed the puck to Bjorkstrand in the high slot and he scored into a vacated net, his sixth goal of the season.
“I think it looked good for the most part,” Bjorkstrand said after the game. “Obviously, Cuylle hasn’t played center, but I thought he did well. We were able to find a bit more chemistry at the end there.”
Playing Cuylle at center never was likely to be a long-term solution, and after he kept the line together for the start of Thursday night’s 3-2 comeback win over the Flyers at the Garden, Sullivan broke it up in the third period.
With the Rangers down 2-1, Sullivan shuffled his lines, dropping the struggling Pavel Dorofeyev off the top line to the third line, with Noah Laba at center and Cuylle back at left wing. He put Gabe Perreault back on the top line, with Mika Zibanejad and Alexis Lafreniere, and put Oliver Bjorkstrand back on the second line, with J.T. Miller and Tye Kartye.
Dorofeyev tied the score at 13:52 of the third period and Kartye scored at 15:21 to help the Rangers (9-7-1) pull out the win, but the willingness to think outside the box to try to find short-term fixes — such as trying Cuylle in the middle — as well as the instinct to go back to the familiar when the experiments don’t work is what Sullivan is going to have to continue to do this season to keep the Rangers in the hunt for a playoff spot.
Sullivan will get Korpisalo — who made 34 saves in a tuneup game for the Rangers’ Hartford farm team on Wednesday in Hershey, Pennsylvania — back on the four-game swing to Seattle and Western Canada that starts Saturday. Having him available will help, but it won’t solve all of the Rangers’ problems.
Sullivan still has 67 games to navigate without Shesterkin, and he’s going to have to come up with all kinds of innovative ideas to keep the Rangers alive.
Notes & quotes: Defenseman Sean Durzi was placed on injured reserve, retroactive to Oct. 26. At Thursday’s morning skate, Sullivan said Durzi might not go with the team on the road trip but could join it in progress . . . Adam Fox has recorded 20 points in 17 games, reaching that mark the fastest by a Rangers defenseman since Brian Leetch (15 games in 2000-01). He tallied his sixth multi-point game of the season.
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.
