#Rangers’ goal: Build on their pre-pandemic momentum

The Rangers have dedicated all of training camp 2.0 to getting back to the brand of hockey they were playing before the regular season was suspended.

Back to the three-plus goals a game they averaged through the final 10 matchups. Back to the cohesiveness the team finally found after months of gelling several new faces. Back to the competitiveness that drove them to make the final cut for the playoffs.

“I don’t want to forget what happened the last 2¹/₂ months of the season, when we were playing good hockey, had continuity between our lines,” coach David Quinn said.

Throughout the past two weeks of training camp, the Rangers have collectively expressed their plan to pick up where they left off. Quinn had revealed he felt as though he was already coaching playoff hockey before the coronavirus pandemic shutdown, considering the team was fighting tooth and nail to qualify for the organization’s first bid to the tournament since the 2016-17 season.

Now, with less than a week until the play-in series against the Hurricanes in Toronto, the challenge is to get back to that.

“We just kind of wanted to get back together and pick up where we left off,” he said. “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.”

Quinn, who will be coaching in his first postseason, wasted no time in distinguishing between his expanded roster when training camp 2.0 began. He separated the players who spent more time with the team’s AHL affiliate, the Hartford Wolf Pack, and other prospects from the main roster on Day 1. He said he wanted to be “crystal clear” it wasn’t a normal training camp, when several roster spots are up for grabs.

The Rangers’ lines and defensive pairings have remained relatively the same, except for changes that were prompted by outside factors — like Brendan Lemieux’s suspension, Chris Kreider being healthy and Michael Haley remaining on the injured list.

Coming in and knowing what he wants his lineup to look like has allowed Quinn to shift his focus elsewhere. The one area he said he wanted to polish before the break was sharpening the team’s defensive zone structure and puck pressure, so that’s exactly what Quinn set out to accomplish in the past two weeks.

A handful of players have alluded to a sense of comfort throughout the team that wasn’t there at the start of the 2019-20 season. With Quinn’s message of getting back to how the team was playing before the hiatus, it’s allowed the Rangers to come into camp knowing what their role is.

In turn, the Rangers are finding it easier to navigate back into a competitive mindset.

“Neither team has played since March, so it’s a complete different situation, and we just have to go into this with the mindset of doing everything we can,” Mika Zibanejad said. “Try to get back to the way we played when we finished the season, before it got paused.”