PITTSBURGH – The challenge has been issued by Ron Low, the good man who could be in his final days as head coach of the Rangers if the team doesn’t respond with a passionate effort here this afternoon against the Penguins.
The challenge has been issued to the team as an entity and to Eric Lindros as an individual.
“If we don’t come out with a physical effort, then there’s a major problem,” Low said yesterday following a 40-minute skate at the Penguins’ suburban practice facility. “We need that from everybody.”
Hockey is a team game, and the team needs a big performance from everyone from Mike Richter in goal on out, but it needs the biggest performance of all from Lindros, who has been playing on the perimeter ever since sustaining his second knee injury of the season on Jan. 28 – and just when he had become the same dominating, intimidating, mean player he’d been before sustaining a concussion exactly one month earlier.
“It seems like every time Eric [is physical], something happens on the back side to him,” said Low. “It’s a strange situation. Twice he’s gotten hurt on two hits he initiated, on the concussion and the knee. So to me, it’s difficult.
“The flip side is, we have to have him play [aggressive, physical hockey]. We have to. Other players have to be involved, but we take our lead from Eric.”
Lindros said he had not been any more cautious in the wake of his last knee injury than he had been prior to it, that he was not concerned about initiating contact. “I just had some bad luck,” he said.
The Rangers were awful in eight of the nine periods they played this week, losing to Calgary at home on Monday, rousing themselves for a third-period rally to overcome Minnesota in OT on Wednesday, before being ousted in a bloodless coup in Chicago on Thursday. They are 4-8 in their last 12, 7-14-1-1 in their last 23.
While problems run the course, Lindros surely understands the burden facing him the remainder of the season. The Rangers will miss the playoffs if Lindros can’t replicate his performance of November and December, when his play and persona carried his team to the conference’s upper echelons.
“Any time we’ve had success, we’ve had our best players playing at a high level and everything else has fallen into line,” he said. “The tone has to be set, whether by me or somebody else.”
