It wasn’t quite the equivalent of picking a batting order out of a hat, but when the Rangers met the Penguins last night at the Garden, every one of their line combinations was a new one.
“Why? Well, it’s not as if things have been working so well, have they?” John Muckler asked, rhetorically, following yesterday’s brief Rye morning skate. “It’s a new look.”
Which looked like this: Wayne Gretzky between Adam Graves and Niklas Sundstrom; Petr Nedved flanked by Brent Fedyk and Mike Knuble; Marc Savard centering Kevin Stevens and Todd Harvey, and Manny Malhotra as the pivot for Eric Lacroix and John MacLean.
“We wanted to move Sunny up to help out Gretz on the defensive side of the puck,” Muckler said of No. 99, whose plus-minus rating has plummeted to a minus-21 over the last week. “Coming off his [two-goal] game [against Montreal], Knuble definitely earned more ice time.
“With Harvey’s thumb still sore, he’s having some trouble shooting the puck, so we’re going to use Johnny Mac on the power play with Gretz, but if he’s with Manny at full strength, that gives us a line we can go with against [Jaromir] Jagr if he’s double-shifted.
“You look at the line with Mac, Manny and Lacroix, and it’s not a fourth line; it’s one of four lines.”
In addition to switching up his forward combinations, Muckler changed two of the Rangers’ three defensive pairs for last night. The Brian Leetch-Ulf Samuelsson tandem remained intact, but Mathieu Schneider moved from Rich Brennan’s left to Chris Tamer’s right, while Brennan skated to the right of Stan Neckar.
No matter the combinations, however, the Rangers were going to be challenged to simply get through the opening five minutes without falling behind. Having lost seven of their previous eight at the Garden, the Rangers face each opening Broadway faceoff with trepidation. It shows. On Sunday, they fell behind Detroit at 1:12 on their way to a 3-0 deficit at 14:36; on Wednesday they fell behind Montreal at 4:25 on their way to a 3-0 deficit at 5:32.
“We talk about it so much, maybe we’ve talked about it too much,” said Muckler. “What happens is, instead of starting a game, especially at home, in an aggressive frame of mind, we start with our players trying to protect against making a mistake.
“We don’t go out there with the frame of mind to take control, which is the way you want to feel when you’re at home. But because of everything that’s happened to us-which is nobody’s fault but our own-every game starts with the team feeling an incredible amount of pressure.
“And then if we do fall behind, you can just feel the sag. And so 1-0 becomes 2-0. It’s a vicious cycle that we have to turn around.” *The game marked Alexei Kovalev’s first visit to the Garden since having been dealt to the Penguins on Nov. 25.
Kovalev had registered 31 points (15-16) in 34 games with Pittsburgh.
Dan Cloutier, who relieved Richter in the first period of both the Detroit and Montreal games, got the start last night, which was his 10th of the year and second in the last three games.
