They have been at or near the top of the NHL overall standings for a substantial enough amount of time to beg the question whether the Rangers just might be the best team in the league entering the holiday recess.
It’s an impossible question to answer, isn’t it? Which means that 32 games into their season, the Rangers just might be the team to beat. Who expected that about three months into Peter Laviolette’s tenure behind the bench.
Saturday represented another night on which the Rangers found the way. It was not perfect. It rarely is for this team. But the team goes into the short moratorium buoyed by its 4-3 overtime victory over the Sabres at the Garden on Chris Kreider’s winner off Mika Zibanejad’s setup.
Butch and Sundance.
The Blueshirts go into the break with a good taste, having washed the remnants of Friday’s unsatisfying 4-3 defeat to the Oilers right out of their mouths. This is something that this team does. It bounces back. It has a short memory. It self-corrects. It is coached.
The veterans who talked the talk on exit day by telling general manager Chris Drury that they needed to be coached up. They wanted to be challenged. Now they are walking the walk. They are being coached up and living the life.
“They are receptive. I do think it’s a self-awareness,” Laviolette said this week. “I think when you played well and you know you played a good game there’s a standard or a kind of bar that you’ve kind of set for yourself.
“Sometimes you’re under the bar and you may win or lose, and there are sometimes when you’re not even close to the bar. Self-awareness or presented to be self-aware on what we need to do to be better, why it wasn’t successful, but I do think there has to be a receptive audience to that as well.”
This is not a perfect union. But there are no perfect teams in this NHL. The Rangers sometimes bend but they don’t often break. Now that the Artemi Panarin-Vincent Trocheck-Alexis Lafreniere unit has cooled, without a five-on-five goal over the past nine contests, the Kreider-Zibanejad-Blake Wheeler connection has taken the baton and run with it.
There is a long way to Tipperary, almost as long as it is to the start of the playoffs. An entire season essentially lays ahead. The winter grind takes its toll. Which is one way to say that it will be mighty interesting to see what the 37-year-old Wheeler has in his arsenal come April, May and June.
But if the winger maintains his legs, if the chemistry that appears to be developing among him and Zibanejad and Kreider flourishes, then the Blueshirts may not have to go to market for a right wing to play in that spot. If Wheeler can thrive under playoff conditions, the Rangers have the prototypical power winger to offset the best buds. And general manager Chris Drury can use his deadline resources elsewhere.
This is a can-do collection that is likely playing slightly over its skis. But there’s a grit there, exemplified by a kid like Will Cuylle or a veteran named Nick Bonino. The team is more than the collection of its parts.
They check, with Laviolette using the Jimmy Vesey-Barclay Goodrow-Tyler Pitlick unit as a matching checking line. Saturday, the unit was up against Tage Thompson after Friday facing Connor McDavid after two weeks ago lining up against Anze Kopitar. The checkers role-play.
The Blueshirts can use some more size and menace when it comes to the playoffs. They need to be able to control the net fronts at both ends. They are not physical enough now. They are not malicious enough. Drury has months to get assets that will make this a much more difficult team against which to play.
And the Rangers are going to need the Igor Shesterkin of overtime in order to go the distance. Shesterkin flashed back to his 2021-22 Vezina season in making three spectacular saves in extra time before Kreider could strike. This — not the imposter who ranks between 15th and 21st in just about every statistical category — is who the team will need to win 16 playoff games.
It is less than halfway through the season. That is true. It is also true that the Blueshirts are 23-8-1 for a .734 winning percentage that leads the league. Are they the best team in the NHL? Maybe not.
But just maybe they are.
Christmas in December for the Rangers.
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