Rangers knew they had to pick up the pace, and they have so far in January

Standing in the visitors’ dressing room in Salt Lake City’s Delta Center late Thursday night, Ryan Lindgren was asked by reporters for his State of the Rangers address.

A few minutes earlier, the defenseman and his teammates had put the finishing touches on a 5-3 win over Utah that put them over NHL .500 for the first time since Dec. 20.

Lindgren felt good not only about the win but about the way the Rangers have been playing in the calendar year 2025.

“As a team, we’ve been playing a lot better ever since the [holiday] break,” he said. “Kind of defending better. Playing better as a group. I think that means guys are going to start playing better, too. Yeah, we like where we’re at right now. We just got to keep it going.”

Entering Saturday night’s game at the Garden against the surprising Blue Jackets, the Rangers (21-20-3) appear to have rediscovered their identity after having spent the better part of two months in a very public state of flux.

Beginning with the 2-1 win over Boston on Jan. 2, the Rangers were 5-1-2 in the eight games they had played this month. Their 12 points and .750 points percentage in that span ranked third and fifth in the league, respectively.

Even though eight games is a small sample size, it bears noting that the Rangers were a combined 10-17-0 in November (7-7-0) and December (3-10-0).

Is it the beginning of an evolution?

To a man, the Rangers believe that to be the case.

“We were obviously searching for answers for a while there in December,” Lindgren said. “We knew where we were standings-wise, where we were at in the season, and we needed to start playing a lot better to get out of that. And I think it was a mindset and we started playing a heck of a lot better. We got to keep it going.”

As a result of their two-month period of self-reflection, the Rangers were seventh in the Metropolitan Division, 14th in the Eastern Conference and 24th overall entering Saturday. They were four points out of a wild-card spot and still had six teams to leapfrog with 37 games left in the regular season.

For a team that not all that long ago reveled in its Presidents’ Trophy-winning 2023-24 regular season and run to the Eastern Conference Final, this is not where they expected to be at this point in the campaign. But it is the reality of the situation.

“We’re going to be playing hard teams for the rest of the season,” Reilly Smith said after the win in Utah, which completed a 2-0-1 road trip. “So obviously the first one in Vegas was important. That’s a tough team to beat and then move on to Colorado, and even picking up one point there is important. So we got ourselves off to a great start on this road trip and it was great to be able to cap it off this way.”

So, then, what are the Rangers doing now that is markedly different from what they had been doing earlier in the season? What has changed?

Simply, they are generating more and yielding less.

According to Natural Stat Trick, in the eight games the Rangers had played in January, they had five more high-danger goals for (11-6) and four more scoring chances goals for (17-13) than their opponents. They also had generated more scoring chances and more high-danger shots than their opponents.

“We’ve been playing some good hockey,” Peter Laviolette said. “We just got to continue to do that. We got to remember what’s gotten us here. We got to take that into every game, that mindset of what works for us right now, and if we do that, we’re going to get a chance.”

Notes & quotes: Entering Saturday, C Vincent Trocheck ranked third in the NHL in faceoff percentage (60.2) and faceoff wins (524). He had 11 points (six goals, five assists) in his last 13 games . . .  The Blue Jackets (22-17-6, 50 points) entered Saturday sitting in the first wild-card spot after a 10-2-1 run dating to their 4-2 win over the Devils on Dec. 19.