has been talking up the Rangers recently<\/a>, suggesting that the Rangers have the best record over the course of the late-season run, it bears remembering that their are lies, damn lies and statistics.\u00a0 Looking closely at the numbers, it is without a doubt true that the Rangers had a very weak schedule (in terms of the strength of their opponents) over this time frame.\u00a0\u00a0 The\u00a0Blueshirts won 17 games after the 9th of February, but only 5 of these came against playoff-bound teams.\u00a0Three of those five wins came at the expense of their crosstown rivals the\u00a0Islanders, who qualified in the lowest seed position\u00a0only after a heroic effort to run the table and win their final four games of the year.\u00a0\u00a0 What all of this means is that the Rangers matched up great against the Islanders and various other opponents who were not invited to Lord Stanley’s\u00a0prom this year.<\/p>\nToo bad for them they’ll be facing the number one seeded, President’s Trophy winning Buffalo Sabres, otherwise known as the odds-on-favourite Prom Kings.\u00a0 Examining the Sabres’ record over the very same period – February 9th ’til the end of the regular season – the Sabres won 16 games, six against playoff-bound opponents (Penguins, Islanders, Devils, Lightning, Flames and Senators).\u00a0\u00a0 Translation:\u00a0 in a period during which the Rangers were supposedly hot like a Tonawanda townhouse, they\u00a0won exactly one more game than the Sabres, and did it against weaker opponents.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Did I mention that the Sabres absolutely owned<\/em> their Broadway rivals during the regular season?\u00a0 How does winning 4 out of 4 meetings sound?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The Rangers better hope that ice plant failures in both teams’ buildings force the league to decree that the winner of this series will be decided according to whose city has the largest number of giant statues received as a gift from France;\u00a0 if the teams compete instead at hockey, Madison Square Garden can book the circus for a bonus run in May.<\/p>\nGoaltending<\/strong><\/p>\n\u00a0I give a slight edge to the Rangers in the goaltending department.\u00a0 King Henrik’s numbers (the important ones like save percentage and goals-against average) are better than Ryan Miller’s.\u00a0 In terms of previous exposure to pressure, while Miller carried the load for the Sabres during last year’s lengthy run-to-the-almost-final, Lundqvist has a shiny golden knick knack somewhere in his dresser drawer as a reminder of his recent trip to Torino that tells me he can stare down some pretty good shooters competing at a high level and not come up with a case of the yips.\u00a0\u00a0 What Lundqvist doesn’t yet have is significant post-season experience:\u00a0 a four game sweep of the Thrashers has not been an accurate harbinger of the bad things yet to come.\u00a0 I have a feeling that in years to come, Henrik\u00a0will suggest that using that series as a preview of his encounter with the Sabres was kind\u00a0of like\u00a0watching the trailer for\u00a0Big Momma’s House 2:\u00a0 you just know<\/strong><\/em> it’s gonna be bad, but\u00a0you have no idea how soul-achingly bad it can get until you’ve paid 13 bucks to see Martin Lawrence in drag and a fat suit.\u00a0 Again.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\nWhatever advantage Lundqvist represents to the Rangers, in a general sense,\u00a0though, is moderated when one recognizes that the Sabres seem to have had his number at times this year.\u00a0 In their final\u00a0regular-season meeting on December 1st, for example, although Buffalo was outshot 39-19 and took only 8 shots on goal over the final two periods, they scored two goals on the city so nice they named it twice, and won in a shootout.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Defence<\/strong><\/p>\nThe edge has to go to the Sabres here.\u00a0 Numminen, Campbell, Tallinder and Kalinin are way better than any four Rangers defencemen, and running their surnames together like that also sounds kinda cool like a 70s prog-rock band.\u00a0 Of concern for both teams is the lack of a consistent shooting threat on the power play blueline.\u00a0 Look for Jagr to spend some time manning the New York point with the man-advantage to try to create offense where none would be otherwise forthcoming, and look for turnovers while\u00a0on the power-play to burn the Rangers when Jagr gets caught trying to defend against the penalty-killing Buffalonians.\u00a0 Buffalo has Campbell, Spacek and Numminen to rely on during the power play;\u00a0 not exactly Paul Coffey material, but not exactly Daniel Girardi either (with apologies to Daniel Girardi).\u00a0<\/p>\n
Forwards<\/strong><\/p>\nAny team with Jagr, Nylander and Shanahan has obvious offensive talent, and the Rangers have some scoring depth too, with twenty goal scorers during the regular season.\u00a0 Here again, though, the Rangers play Anthony Michael Hall to the Sabres’ Eddie Murphy:\u00a0 Buffalo had seven twenty goal men, and an eighth with 19 markers.\u00a0\u00a0 Never mind all that, though, it’s the playoffs and goals get progressively harder to come by, so let’s not pretend that regular season scoring numbers tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What will<\/em> be important is that it has been shown, over the course of the season, that above-average team speed and quickness on the puck must be combined to produce a withering forecheck to put Buffalo’s somewhat vulnerable defence back on its heels, causing some offensive chances for the forechecker but more importantly, disrupting the Sabres’ potent freewheeling attack.\u00a0 Buffalo’s offence is quick, creative and explosive – if the Rangers are unable to sustain such an attack, and it says here that they don’t have the skills necessary to do it (notwithstanding the best efforts of Sean Avery and Brendan Shanahan), that failure combined with the Sabres’ deadly counter-attack following turnovers in the neutral zone will have the Rangers hunting for decent tee times in no time flat.<\/p>\nAll bets are off if:\u00a0 Ryan Miller gets injured.\u00a0 No offense to Ty Conklin, but his playoff track record doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence.\u00a0 I reserve right to pretend I never wrote any of the above if Miller pulls up lame at any point during the series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The State of New York is holding its breath tonight . Tomorrow, round 2 of the National Hockey League playoffs begins in earnest as the Number 1 seeded Sabres meet the 6th-ranked Rangers in what promises to be the most interesting of the two Eastern Conference semi-finals. Don’t worry, Connecticut, your big Empire State brother […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}