in an oven

Mikey – Pittsburgh has played a few less games. Expect their goals/game to go up by year end when they get Gonchar back.

Clearly (nothing new) we have a glut of 3rd liners on this team. Expecting them to be 2nd liners (Cally…forced in there) or high scoring, big contributing 3rd liners (Korpi, Voros, Dawes, Fritsche, Riss, Pru) is misplaced energy because (a) none of them are THAT good and (b) they’d be 2nd liners if they were.

None of the management would ever admit this. Sather would be admitting his incompetence and Renney would be showing disrespect to Sather. So they sugarcoat crap and give 100s of reasons for “still tinkering” and make up whatever excuses they want.

Someone proposed it above….what if this team is really a 4th or 5th place team in the conference? Would we be all fired up at a 17 and 8 record? Probably not, I am guessing. But they get off to a rip roaring start and all of a sudden we have Stanley Cup visions.

Then when the team floats back to reality and the coach and GM start to make BS excuses, we fans are all fired up.

At the end of the day how would we feel if Renney stood up and said, “We have a strong top 4-5 players, then we have a dropoff to where we probably have 7-8 players who are 3rd and 4th liners. On D, we have two guys getting paid huge who are not pulling their weight.”

I think we’d be relieved to hear it, pissed off at Sather for being so stupid for all those moves (we already are pissed off though), and saying, “Sounds like Renney has given up.”

Something to think about.

BTW, tomorrow night vs Cindy it should be interest to see if this team gets up for playing against one of the top teams.

22figure8:

“Rocket-Do you really think that if Potter and Sanguinetti were ready for the NHL, the Rangers would purposely keep them down?”

Do you think that either of those guys could be any worse than Rozsival or Redden? I don’t.

As for being ready, weren’t Callahan, Staal, Girardi and Dubinsky supposed to be “not ready” also? We were calling for them to be called up and inserted into the lineup for months, but we kept getting that answer. Then surprise, when they got their chances, they did fine. They played better than the washed-up veterans they replaced.

My opinion is that SatheRenney don’t want to embarrass Rozsival and Redden – or the Rangers organization which gave them disgraceful contracts – by replacing them and having the kids play better.

Same with Prucha – if they ever gave him a real shot on the PP and he started scoring, they’d have a lot of answering to do for their horrible treatment of him. They’d rather have the worst power play in the league than to take a gamble that Prucha will revive the PP and show that they don’t know their asses from their elbows. So Prucha sits.

It’s full-blown cover your ass mode at MSG.

I heard that at the last game, the fans were chanting “We want Melrose” – LOL!. I wouldn’t go that far, but we certainly need a better coach than we have to get the team rolling on all cylinders. Tortorella, Laviolette, Nolan are all better coaches than Renney, and all are available. I’d be fine with any one of the above.

Prucha should be given a shot somewhere (and, remember, it could be Hartford—if he lit it up down there the management would be even more hard-pressed not to give him a shot in the bigs where the Blueshirts need goals badly). But I think a lot of us need to accept that he was probably a flash in the pan. And an easily knocked off the puck one at that.

I didn’t expect the Rangers to be leading the division at this point, albeit with many more games played and just sneaking by in shootouts. 4th-6th would not be in my expectations, as I thought the team could do really well or really badly based on the players added and potential vs. effort. So far, Renney has milked just enough effort, but it’s definitely not enough to get through the whole season near the top of the standings. By virtue of being first in penalty kill percentage, at least out special teams percentages add to more than 100, which is the sign of a good team; in this case, a team carried by its goaltender.

There have been some games where there was not a full 60 minute showing.

There have been some games where a third period comeback was needed to get a either a point or both.

Stength in goaltending has been a significant factor in ~70% of the wins or more and only one loss.

This is a team that can rise to the challenge that an opponent presents. They can beat any team in the league when they rise to that challenge in terms of effort and play to their strengths within their system.

Going forward from here the schedule gets relatively more difficult so we’ll see how the dicipline and work ethic translate to wins and losses.

It would sure help if the defense were tighter in this upcoming stretch of games – memo to Wade Redden.

The power play cost this team 10 points last season. It is mandatory that the power play starts to put some points on the board.