#David Quinn tasked with getting Chris Kreider, Rangers in playoff shape

Seasons have natural rhythms. Players report to training camp in September after a summer’s work. The athlete who is not in shape from Day 1 rarely catches up and is just as apt to find himself in the AHL as on his NHL team’s top six.

It is fast from the start and it gets faster by increments as calendar pages turn, taking a leap at Thanksgiving, another following the Christmas hiatus, and yet another at the trade deadline with playoff races in focus. And when the playoffs start? It’s like a different sport.

There are signposts marking the journey at which players can be traditionally evaluated and there are various crescendos that build through a season conventionally monitored by coaching staffs. It is never a color-by-numbers operation, but there is familiarity to the calendar tied to the evolving pace.

But there is nothing natural about 2020 and there will be next to nothing conventional about this NHL Return to Play that is two days into camp and a little more than two weeks away from the opening games of the Stanley Cup tournament qualifying round.

So there will be no easing into this. There is nothing familiar here. David Quinn and his staff are not preparing the Rangers for a marathon. The coach and his assistants are preparing the team to hit the ground running as best they can in a vacuum of comparative information.

Players did not report on equal footing. Some were able to skate for weeks in Sweden. Some were confined to their homes for long stretches during the break in action. Some are ahead, some are behind. But where does that leave the team two days into camp and only a little over two weeks away from their Aug. 1 Game 1 against Carolina?

“That’s a good question. I mean, we’re trying to find that out,” Quinn said on a Zoom call following a 50-minute practice that included 20 minutes of scrimmaging. “At the end of the day, we’re probably never going to be in the shape or condition out of the gate we were when the season ended, but every team is going to be in that same situation.

“Our goal is to be in better shape than the other 23 teams. Everything is relative, and we’ve got to find a way to get there in the next 2 ¹/₂ weeks. I have liked what I’ve seen the last two days, I love our energy physically, I love our enthusiasm mentally, guys are staying on and we’ve got to kick them off the ice after practice.”

“There’s a lot of good things going on right now, we’re going in the right direction, but we have a long way to go.”

Mika Zibanejad’s line matched up against Ryan Strome’s in the scrimmage, with Zibanejad and Strome’s left winger, Artemi Panarin, appearing to engage at times in their own private battle of can-you-top-this? The tempo was reasonable throughout the session and prudence was observed. From Monday’s first day to this, there was an uptick.

Zibanejad had Pavel Buchnevich on his right and Chris Kreider on his left. When we last left the Rangers, Kreider had missed his sixth straight game with a broken left foot he sustained by John Tortorella-ing a Phillippe Meyers shot in Philadelphia on Feb. 28. He and the team were pointing to a return on March 16 or March 18. That, the winger admitted on his Zoom call Tuesday, might not have represented the wisest thinking.

“I think I might have been pushing a little more than I should have to come back a little earlier than I should have,” Kreider said. “It certainly didn’t feel good putting the boot on the first few minutes when I first got onto the ice before it started to settle down a little bit.

“But a few weeks into quarantine it just all of a sudden woke up and felt pretty good. There was a decent amount of rehab initially, but everything is 100 percent now.”

Which means that Kreider is in what type of condition two-plus weeks out from Game 1 of a best-of-five?

“It’s hard to be a judge of what kind of hockey shape you are. You haven’t played in any games,” he said. “I know the pace of our two practices has been really good. I think it surprised a lot of people just how fast it was and how long we were able to go.”

“I don’t know whether that’s because guys were well-rested and fresh and excited to be back but I think we’ll probably have a better idea [where we stand] over the next few days as the volume starts to build.”