#Rangers’ surreal playoff journey will be like a ‘jump on a moving train’

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Chris Kreider and Jesper Fast
Nick Homler/NY Rangers

There is no context into which the Rangers’ post-pandemic camp can be placed. There is no precedent against which to measure performance and readiness. An NHL team generally plays its first exhibition game four or five days into a traditional September training camp. Natural guideposts and check points are in abundance.

But there is nothing natural about this, even if a sense of normalcy pervades the rink. Conventional markers do not exist. Friday will mark the 10th day of intrasquad activity for the Blueshirts, who still won’t compete against a team with a different uniform until Wednesday. That’s the night they will face the Islanders in Toronto in the lone scheduled dress rehearsal preceding the ready-or-not, Aug. 1 best-of-five opener against Carolina.

“It’s hard to speak to because I’ve never been in a situation like this, but I imagine it’s going to be quite a jump [into the qualifying round], and there are going to be a lot of nerves, a lot of butterflies, and there should be,” Chris Kreider said via Zoom following Thursday’s practice that was bookended by specialty team work. “That’s how it is when you go from the full regular season into the playoffs.

“It’s kind of like trying to jump on a speeding train in a lot of ways, but it’s like that for everybody.”

The Rangers will charter to Toronto on Sunday. David Quinn said they will practice each day leading up to the Islanders match and will take the next day off. They’ll prep for the Candy ’Canes one more time, on Friday the 31st, before the puck drops the following day at high noon.

“I think the concept of the extended practice schedule was to use the first several days to get ourselves into playing shape, get ourselves up to speed and to get comfortable making plays at speed with less time and space,” Kreider said. “Those are things that are hard to recreate, so that’s why we’ve been scrimmaging a bunch and that’s we need to scrimmage a little bit as we get later and later in camp.

“Closer to game time on Aug. 1, I think we’re starting to do a little pre-scout and kind of hammer home some of the things we want to do going into that series.”

Again. David Quinn is going to ride the horses that got him and the Rangers to this point, the team closing 18-10-1 to gain the invite to the qualifiers. The defense pairs are the same as they were in the final eight games following the deadline trade of Brady Skjei to Carolina. The top two lines are the same as they’d been for months before Kreider broke his foot on Feb. 28. The bottom two lines have been reworked to accommodate Brendan Lemieux’s suspension for the first two games. Igor Shesterkin is the goalie with one net while Henrik Lundqvist — spectacular on Thursday — and Alex Georgiev split the other.

Again. This Phase 3 camp experience was not, and never meant to be, an open tryout or laboratory experiment. Morgan Barron might have been given a shot to crack the varsity at left wing if the Cornell junior had been permitted to sign and play, and it is possible that Lias Andersson would have created an impact and crashed the party had he accepted the club’s invitation to attend. But the fact is this has been and will continue to be about the 2019-20 Rangers getting ready for the playoffs; er play-ins.

“I think it’s a signal in the belief we had in the direction we were going when this whole thing ended,” Quinn said. “We just kind of wanted to get back together and pick up where we left off because we felt like we were playing good hockey and were giving ourselves a chance night-in and night-out doing the things we were doing.

“I think the guys are in a good spot. The only thing we’re really focusing on is how well we’re playing and how hard we practice. They’re oblivious to all the other things that are going on and not allowing [COVID-related protocols or issues] to get in the way of the task at hand, which is to get better every day.”