J.T. Miller’s message has not changed and neither has the Rangers’ play

J.T. Miller is the captain of the New York Rangers, and part of his responsibility as the leader of the team is speaking with the media after each game. Miller once again held court following yet another Rangers' home loss, and like a good politician he's done a good job staying disciplined with his message. That works for someone on the campaign trail trying to get elected, but at this point in the season Miller's repeated refrain is starting to ring hollow.

Miller has repeatedly talked about effort and compete

After the Rangers' 4-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning, Miller had this to say about what went wrong.

"Just will and determination. They were more willful than we were today. They were ready to go into every battle... At no point in that game were we deserving of winning."

That's a sentiment that Mike Sullivan agreed with, and something he spent a good deal talking about in his postgame press conference.

After a loss against the Detroit Red Wings on November 16, Miller said, "Today wasn't good enough."

After a 3-0 loss on home ice to the Carolina Hurricanes on November 4, Miller stated, "I need to be better and to lead better for these guys. Just not acceptable at home to not get the job done at the end of the day, whether you play well or not."

And after a loss to the Minnesota Wild on October 20, Miller admitted, "We have to find a way to bear down in those tight 2-1 games when, let's be honest, we didn't deserve to win. But that was a game we could've stolen. It's happened to us so far. Not good enough, we know that. Turn the page and move on to the next one."

The point of laying all of this out there is intentional, because Miller is essentially saying the same thing each time slightly differently. The theme is the Rangers and their effort and preperation to play at home and with the Rangers now having lost eight games at home it is at a point where things need to change fast.

If the Rangers had a handful of these losses you can write them of as being a bit of an anomaly. It is true that they've spent a lot of time on the road to start the season, and they have a stretch of home games in succession coming up to try and balance that out.

Saturday's loss against the Lightning was infuriating because it was against a squad that has been playing a lot of hockey lately, including a game on Friday in Detroit, and they iced a lineup that saw Andrei Vasilevskiy sit on the bench while Brayden Point, Victor Hedman, Ryan McDonagh, and Erik Cernak out with injuries. This is not to say that the Rangers far and away should have won the game. Tampa still had Nikita Kucherov, Brandon Hagel, Jake Guentzel, Anthony Cirelli and other talented players dressed, but the game shouldn't have been as lopsided as it was.

Miller has now appeared in 25 games this season for the Rangers and he's got a line of 7-7-14 with one goal coming in the loss to Tampa in which a shot of goal from Adam Fox deflected off his skate. The Rangers' captain hasn't looked right for most of the season after tweaking his groin in training camp, and he recently missed a pair of games with an upper-body injury. The Rangers enjoyed Miller's production of 13 goals, 22 assists, and 35 points in 32 games after acquiring him from Vancouver last season, and that's what they thought they'd get this year.

All of this is to say that if effort and production are going to be a central point of Miller's message, more impact will be felt if he himself is pulling his weight to help the team win games. For the majority of this season that hasn't been the case, and that will have to change if the Rangers hope to turn things around while they have the opportunity to do so.