Rangers Explode on Offense, Get Back on the Winning Side

Well how ’bout that? What an emphatic response to our most recent podcast. 7 goals?! It wasn’t entirely pretty, though. Let’s not forget this team went down 2-0 and forced Torts to call a timeout to wake up his team. That still is an obvious cause for concern for me, but at least the team responded this time around.

Clearly one of the biggest themes we talked about in our last podcast was the lack of scoring production from anyone on the team outside of Gaborik and Vinny. Well, praise the hockey gods because the rest of the team finally decided to show up. Gaborik is still unbelievable and tallied four points to his name – that’s great. But how ’bout these names: Avery (twice), Del Zotto, Anisimov, Gilroy. I know we still don’t see Callahan, Higgins (to be fair he did have two assists), Lisin, Kotalik (just to name a few) up there in the goal scoring column, but at this point I’ll take ANY secondary goal scoring production. This just goes to show if the team can find a way to get goals from players outside of just Gaborik and Vinny, they can do some damage in Torts’ system.

While I’m excited to see such an offensive explosion, my optimism remains reserved. I still throw the caution flag out at the fact that it took a lackluster start and two-goal deficit for this team to wake up. Top-tier teams (i.e. Pens, Flyers, Devils) will bury a team if they jump out to an early lead like that. I’m also wary at the fact that the defense still allowed four goals. Call me greedy, but when you score seven unanswered goals to take a 7-2 lead, the last thing I want to see is allowing the other team to even sniff any sort of comeback. I’m not saying the Blue Jackets were coming back from 7-2 down, but it goes back to one of our other big points from the podcast about this defense being rather inconsistent this year. I’m still waiting for a complete game on the defensive end of the ice.

With that said, let’s not lose sight of all the positives. The other thing that really stood out to me, aside from the barrage of goals scored by the Rangers, was the fact that the Blue Jackets only had one power play opportunity. Despite a good PK unit, committing too many penalties has plagued New York all season long. It kills the flow of the game, especially for an offense that likes to fly up and down the ice. If the Rangers can keep playing 5-on-5 hockey, they should win a lot of games.

All in all, a win and goal scoring output like last night is refreshing. It cleans out some of that bitter taste we, as Ranger fans, have been stuck with of late. What comes next? The Rangers need to prove this was no fluke and string some wins together because they still haven’t won back to back games since the 7-game win streak last month.

As always, Let’s Go Rangers!