After Tuesday night’s sluggish peformance against Buffalo, coach Tom Renney figured the Rangers needed a team meeting – four days early.

At the beginning of the season, Renney chiseled the schedule into sets of five games which he called “segments.” After each segment, they hold a meeting. This time, Renney refused to wait until the end of this, the 10th segment, which would have ended after Saturday’s home game against Pittsburgh.

“We figure if we can win the rest of our segments we’ll make the playoffs,” said Renney after the Rangers had a talk of reassurance yesterday. “We just want to bring the attention back to our segments.”

No doubt, the crux of yesterday’s meeting had to do with Tuesday’s 2-1 loss to the Sabres. After the game, Steve Rucchin called out his teammates, saying, “There’s no question that only a few of us came to play; really a handful at best.”

Renney agreed with Rucchin’s statement and had no problem with him voicing his opinion.

“If it was a feature of our team more often than not, yeah [I’d have a problem with the Rangers’ play],” Renney said. “But it hasn’t happened very often. My hope is that this is sort of an enigma, where we had one of those games where we didn’t have all hands on deck. I’m not sure everyone came to play all the time. I think everyone at some point in time gave everything they had. I just don’t think it was collectively at the same time.”

But mostly it seemed Renney took issue with his team’s aggressiveness. The most telling statement yesterday came after Renney was asked if there were any bumps or bruises of which the media should be made aware.

“I don’t know if we should be so sore coming out of last night,” said Renney, who also said that at no point did he think about practicing yesterday because of the loss.

The team meeting lasted roughly 40 minutes, and Darius Kasparaitis said it wasn’t one of the panic variety.

“Sometimes we have meetings like that whether we play bad or good,” Kasparaitis said. “It’s more like checking in and see where we’re at as a team. It’s all about that we believe in ourselves . . . Tom just let us know that he feels good about us.”

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Renney told Jaromir Jagr, who has been battling a nasty cold, to stay home yesterday.

“I tried to quarantine him, make sure he doesn’t pass it on,” Renney said.