As I write this, the Rangers have played roughly two periods of their 2009-10 season. While this is an extremely small sample size, it's not too early to draw a few conclusions about this Rangers team. Here's an unbiased look at what we've seen so far...
Make no mistake about it - this is John Tortorella's team. The Rangers of the past few years have been horribly boring. Last year, I referred to them as "The New Devils". This year? Not so much. The Rangers are playing like they actually care about scoring goals. Part of this is because they have a team better suited to scoring goals, but the biggest change is in the Rangers' philosophy.
The Rangers have treated routine plays like power play opportunities in this game, and that's a good thing. There have been plays where both defensemen pinched in to the top of the faceoff circles. They've been able to set up well and pass the puck even better. They seem a little more confident on offense, and they've had a good number of scoring chances. Only one went in, but that's okay.
Now, the problem with this philosophy is that the Rangers are prone to odd-man rushes. That they missed a bunch of assignments in the second period didn't really help things. On the Penguins' second goal, Chris Drury settled for a simple stick check on Sidney Crosby, as opposed to tying him up and keeping him from scoring. Once the Penguins started buzzing, the Rangers didn't adjust, pretty much letting the Penguins have their way as the second period concluded.
This is the problem with the Rangers. They've traditionally been a defense-first team, and now they're opting for more of a balanced look, if not a look that favors offense. It's easy to think Henrik Lundqvist will bail them out all season, but the Rangers might have done a little too much to tinker with what worked for them since the lockout.
Glen Sather is the ultimate whack-a-mole general manager - that is, he tries to solve the problem in front of him while ignoring future problems. This off-season, he added offense, which was the Rangers' most glaring need. However, he didn't bring back Blair Betts or Fredrik Sjostrom, two important parts of the NHL's best penalty kill last year. The extra power play goals they'll let up this year could be dangerous, particularly if Marian Gaborik goes down.
Still, this is going to be a far more fun team to watch than it has been. Not that that's a great compliment or anything. However, the Rangers aren't going to suddenly be able to outscore teams like Pittsburgh and Washington just because they signed one scorer. It will be interesting to see how they change their play in the third period of this game. They need to be aggressive to make up a two-goal deficit, but they can't get caught napping as they did in the second.
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