From the sounds of it, David Quinn was not overly pleased with the way the Rangers practiced their power play on Thursday.
Sounds like these:
“One point the last two games, if we’d gotten a power-play goal maybe we’d gotten more than that, maybe we’d have won,” the coach barked at his players. “Congratulations, you played pretty well the other night. …
“You lost.”
The power play went 0-for-4 in Monday’s 5-2 defeat to the Predators in which the Blueshirts had 11 shots in eight minutes of man-advantage play and finished with a 41-24 overall edge in shots. The Rangers, 14th in the NHL on the power play at 19.8 percent, failed on both of their opportunities in Saturday’s shootout defeat in Anaheim.
“I think Quinney had a good point. If we get a [power-play] goal on Monday, that game changes,” Ryan Strome, who got only 35 seconds on the second unit in that one, told The Post. “It’s not like he’s yelling at us as people. He had a message that’s pretty important and that’s the way he expressed it.
David QuinnGetty Images“We all know what we need to do to be successful and we weren’t doing it. There’s no mystery why the coaches got frustrated. Quinney’s done a pretty good job of getting his points across to us.”
The point, as it always seems to be, was for the Rangers to be more committed in getting the puck and bodies to the net instead of playing on the outside while in search of the perfect goal.
“[It was] just the pace. I didn’t love our pace. It was too slow,” Quinn said. “When we get the puck, we stop it, we stick-handle and let the penalty kill get back into its structure, and that’s what’s been happening in the course of the game.
“We talk about where people are [on the ice] and whatnot, but I mean, you have to have pace on your power play. You have to be ready to shoot — you can’t stand there and stick-handle it. I think guys would be shocked, regardless where we put you, that if you are ready to shoot it and you move the puck quickly and don’t stick-handle, or move quickly with it, what will transpire from that as opposed to, ‘I’m going to go here, you’re going to go there, we’ll do this, we’ll do that.’ ”
Quinn also talked about the Blueshirts needing to be less predictable with the man-advantage. That accounts for part of the reason they’re still fiddling with assignments on the ice. The coach acknowledged that it has been “a challenge” to set the personnel with both Artemi Panarin and Mika Zibanejad accustomed to setting up in the left circle for right-handed one-timers.
Again, though, the coach believes that the same pass-first mentality that afflicts the team five-on-five is having an impact on the power play.
“It’s something we talk about and harp on and try to give them cues of what to look for when you’re getting ready to shoot,” Quinn said. “To me, a lot of times, you’ve already shot the puck before you get it. I think it’s a mentality more than anything.
“Too often when we make those seam plays that we love to make, we’re not ready to shoot. In all probability, the shot is there. Our problem, whether it’s five-on-five or five-on-four, is too often we’ll only shoot the puck when we think we’re going to score. We will not shoot the puck if we think we’re going to create a chance for somebody else.”
Panarin, Zibanejad, Chris Kreider, Kaapo Kakko and Tony DeAngelo comprised the first unit while Strome, Brendan Lemieux, Jacob Trouba, Adam Fox and either Pavel Buchnevich or Filip Chytil were on the second power play.
Kakko skated with Chytil and Lemieux at even-strength while Buchnevich was on the right with Panarin and Strome and Kreider were on the left with Zibanejad and Jesper Fast.
