Beware the first game back from the bye week

The New York Rangers are in their annual bye week meaning they are off for nine straight days.  Long breaks in mid-season have not been kind to the Blueshirts.

When the New York Rangers face the Detroit Red Wings on Friday night at Madison Square Garden, they will have a challenge. The Rangers have played 13 games in the last ten years after a  break as long as five games.  They have won only three of them.

Whether it  be the mandatory bye week, the All-Star break or just scheduling weirdness, it seems that the team just cannot win after a mini-vacation.  The Red Wings are the worst team in the NHL this season so the Rangers should win.  Emphasis on should.

They were true to form earlier this season.  The Rangers had six days off in October after winning their first two games of the season.  They promptly dropped a one-sided 4-1 decision to the Edmonton Oilers at the Garden.

The bye week

The mandatory bye week was negotiated by the NHL Players Association when the league introduced the three-on-three All-Star format.  It gives the players a mandatory five days off in the “dog days” of the season, starting in 2016-17.

This is the second year in a row that the league has combined the mandatory bye week with the All-Star break. All NHL teams will be off for the week before or the week after the All-Star weekend.   The Rangers got the second week off this season.

Before that, the bye weeks had been scattered between January 1 and the end of February.  They revised the schedule after it turned  out that team that had been off were routinely being trounced in their first games back by teams that had been playing.

How have the Rangers fared coming out of the bye weeks?  Not well.

The team had nine days off in a row from January 20-28, 2019.  They were hot going into the break, winning three in a row.  In their first game  back, they lost 1-0 to Philadelphia at Madison Square Garden.

In 2018, their bye week was January 8-12.  They had split the four games going into the bye week and they lost their first two games back.  The first was a one-sided 7-2 loss to the Islanders at the Garden and that was followed by a 5-2 loss in Pittsburgh.

The first mandatory bye week was in January 2017.  The Rangers had won two games in a row going into their January 8-12 bye week. Their first game  back was against Toronto at home and they lost 4-2 and proceeded to lose two more games, before finally winning.

So, the scoreboard for first games back from the bye week?   0-3.  Think that’s bad?  Read on.