The New York Rangers’ once explosive power play has suddenly become the team’s biggest weakness.
The playoffs should be the main topic of conversation as the Rangers push to make the postseason, but the struggling power play has taken over the locker room and players can’t avoid it for any longer.
To give some context into how dreadful the Rangers’ power play has been, they’ve scored two goals over their past 45 attempts on the man advantage.
The Blueshirts rank 26th among all teams in power-play goals with 34 and rank 27th in power play percentage at 17.1%.
Even through all of Peter Laviolette’s changes and tweaks to the personnel, nothing seems to change and their confidence is only getting worse and worse by the game.
After an abysmal game in New Jersey where the Rangers’ power-play struggles continued, they spent practically the entire second half of Sunday’s practice working on the power play.
Usually, the Rangers work on the man advantage for just a few minutes, but on Sunday both power-play units got multiple reps to figure things out.
The first power-play unit consisted of Adam Fox, Artemi Panarin, J.T. Miller, Mika Zibanejad, and Vincent Trocheck.
Meanwhile, Zac Jones, Chris Kreider, Alexis Lafrenière, and Jonny Brodzinski practiced on the second unit with Gabe Perreault and Brennan Othmann alternating.
While both groups failed to score in practice, the puck movement seemed to be much improved, which Laviolette took note of.
“There were a lot of good chances out there to score goals,” Laviolette said. “No goal, but the guys were moving around. I liked the way they were moving. The tempo out there was good. Hope we can carry that into tomorrow.”
Repetition may help the Rangers get into a rhythm on the man advantage, but a new mindset is also needed.
“I think when power play two gets out there, we are trying to just get shots on net, recovering pucks, and just keep firing it at the net,” Brodzinski said. “It’s the only way we are going to get out of this sump, stop getting east-west with it and just start putting a lot more pucks at the net.”
The power play was a big part of the Rangers’ identity last season and they’ll need to get that magic back if they want to sneak into the playoffs.
