New York Rangers: What is lost?

New York Ranger fans are rejoicing at the fact that the team has been appointed to the 2020 playoffs . . . if they actually take place . . . but should they?

Making the New York Rangers one of the twelve Eastern Conference teams to be appointed to the playoff is a fair move by the NHL. The Rangers had just as good a shot at making the playoffs as the other Eastern Conference teams hovering around the cutoff line when play was suspended.

And while this will strike many Rangers fans as a hard fought victory, all that joy should be tempered by what this Ranger team lost due to the cancelled regular season and newly adapted playoff format.

Lost experience

Experience matters. That is what has been lost by this year’s Rangers squad.  They were in the heat of the battle, right there with less than month to go in the season.  The experience of those final ten games would have added more than just a few bricks to the path to the Cup.

When every game counts down the stretch, every game feels like a game seven.  You are tested against all sorts of competition, from the good to the ugly, but you have to beat them all.  You learn how to get up for the lesser opponent just as you do for the games against the top competitors.

This is what will be missed, this is what has been lost.

You can say that it doesn’t matter, that the team made the playoffs this year and that is ALL that matters, but that is short-sighted.  The playoffs may last three game, they may last three weeks, it remains to be seen should they happen at all.  But the experience of whatever comes out of this year’s NHL playoffs will pale in comparison to what could have been.

NHL teams need time to gel.  They need time for core players to find their individual roles during the most important time of the season.  They need to find out which players do not have what it takes to compete at a playoff level.  This helps management make important decisions during the off-season.  It helps the team build an indentity.

History repeats

I loathe the NBA, it’s unwatchable.  But there was a time when the NBA was highly entertaining.  That was the Michael Jordan era.  Starving for things to watch during this pandemic I decided to give the ESPN documentary The Last Dance a shot.

Aside from waking me to the fact that I actually watched more NBA than I remember, the one thing that really stood out were the battles that Jordan’s Chicago Bulls had to endure to get to their first NBA championship. It actually took the best player to ever play the game seven years to win his first championship, and that only came after years of battling Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics and the Bad Boy Detroit Pistons.

The battles against the Pistons were epic playoff series.  Jordan specifically talks about how important they were to making his Bulls teams better in every way.

That bought back memories of the Lawrence Taylor-lead New York Giants teams of the mid-eighties.  The Giants won their first Superbowl after being battle tested for years against the Forty-Niners and Chicago Bears.

Those Jordan-lead Bulls and Taylor-lead Giants became championship teams only after the trial by fire they faced in previous years on the way to the top.  If history has taught us anything it is that the Mika Zibanejad/Artemi Panarin lead Rangers would have gained so much by facing their first trial by fire this year.

The playoffs

Sure, these are still considered the NHL Playoff, and it will be a trial by fire of sorts. But it will be surreal hockey played in sterile environments the likes of which are highly unlikely to be seen again.  Can that actually be counted in the real experience column?

Can facing the Penguins, Lightning, Capitals or Bruins in an empty arena really prepare the Rangers for the years ahead?  Hockey is passion, and the passion of the fans play a real part in the equation.

Yet perhaps the Rangers do catch lighting in a bottle. Being the youngest team in the league can only help them in this re-start scenario.  Maybe they go on a run and play two or three full series.

That would be great, and that would certainly be valuable experience and beneficial to the team even under these strange circumstances. But that feels like a bit of stretch at this point.  It just feels like completing the regular season would have helped the team more in the long run.

Whatever happens to the Rangers from this point forward, the only real certainty is that valuable experience was lost.