The New York Rangers played a really lousy game at the Nassau Coliseum and lost 6-1. It was a convincing and demoralizing loss and the Rangers’ playoff dreams took a big hit. Jacob Trouba also took a big hit, from Matt Martin and was knocked out of the game with what looked like a concussion. If anyone thought Trouba was not important to this team, this game showed how vital he is to the Rangers.
Martin destroyed Trouba. Hope he’s ok pic.twitter.com/NWnbtprl5n
— YESUV🚙 (@IslesWhiteSUV) April 20, 2021
Still, losing one player early in the game should not have impacted the team as much as it did. From that point, the team defense was atrocious. The Rangers were running around in their own zone, abandoning defensive assignments and the Islanders took advantage.
If you were looking for what the Rangers need to improve upon to become a playoff team, this game was a good lesson for them. The operative word was discipline as the Rangers got caught trying to transition to offense before they should have and it cost them repeatedly.
Quinn was brutal in his assessment. “We weren’t playing the way we needed to play if we were going to have a chance tonight. I thought we were sloppy, we were too high risk, too east-west, we weren’t playing fast enough.”
Quinn did highlight a problem that the team has had before. They were coming off a series against New Jersey where goals were “easier” to come by. Quinn said “When we score goals we tend to play the way we played tonight. Sometimes we get carried away with it and against a team like this, in games like this, a game of this magnitude, that stuff doesn’t work, shift in shift out you just can’t play that way. We learned the hard way tonight.”
It’s one reason why the fourth line was the most effective, playing a grinding style that kept the puck in the Islanders’ zone. The top two lines were completely ineffective and their eagerness to transition to offense ended up with pucks in the Rangers’ net.
Hopefully, the Rangers did learn the hard way, as Quinn said. The Rangers are at their worst when they get goal happy and that’s exactly what happened in this game.
If you can stomach it, here is a video recap of the game: