Sunday, April 27, 2008

Power Play Outage


Today the New York Rangers were defeated by the Pittsburgh Penguins 2-0 to take a 2-0 lead in their best-of-seven Eastern Conference Semi-Final match-up. For a full recap go to newyorkrangers.com.

...its almost the same storyline as Game 1. The Rangers didn't deserve to win, but a bad call late ended up hurting us.

...today's call, however, had nothing to do with Crosby and wasn't part of an NHL conspiracy against the Rangers, as I've read on a few message boards, it was just a quick whistle. Real quick. It seems luck is not on our side right now.

...the real culprit tonight was the power play. One word awful. Now I'm not saying that putting a guy who didn't play at all down the stretch in Prucha on the power play would have magically turned things around. But maybe after the first five chances failed, Renney could have tried something different. With how bad our power play was at the end of the year we knew it could come back to burn us in a big spot and tonight it did.

...it might be time for Renney to reunite the three line combinations that actually worked this year. Which were Avery-Dubi-Jagr, Dawes-Gomez-Shanahan, and Straka-Drury-Callahan.

...I understand that Renney had to make defensive adjustments after Friday night's game. But it looked like these adjustments took away the Rangers aggressiveness. I mean we had no offense tonight. That had to be the easiest shutout of Fluery's career.

...while I'm still confident we can comeback. The one thing that worries me is that the Penguins were able to beat us at our own game today. Now I know we can't beat them in a track meet, but if we can't beat them at a slower pace either, I'm not sure when we can win.

...I'll be there Tuesday night cheering these guys on as hard as I can. We can only hope that bounces and whistles start going our way or the Rangers could be making tee times on Friday.

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