It's clear that the Rangers are on the right path
Chris Kreider of the Rangers celebrates his first period goal against the Penguins during Game 7 of the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs at Madison Square Garden on Sunday. Credit: Jim McIsaac
The Rangers completed the extreme makeover of their franchise one year ago Thursday with the firings of coach David Quinn and most of his assistants, a week after dismissing team president John Davidson and general manager Jeff Gorton.
The new man in charge: a former Little League pitching star named Chris Drury. (OK, fine, he also was a Stanley Cup-winning hockey player and a rising star as an executive.)
The whole thing was . . . well, it was so shocking, it made the Islanders’ recent firing of coach Barry Trotz seem downright predictable.
But in professional sports, there is only one criterion that matters in assessing such decisions: Did it work?
The answer to that question could be found Sunday night at a raucous Madison Square Garden, where in a first-round playoff series they once trailed 3-1, the Rangers hosted the Penguins in Game 7 — and advanced with a 4-3 victory on Artemi Panarin's overtime goal.
Whatever shortcomings Garden CEO James Dolan, hockey consigliere Glen Sather and others in the hockey world saw in the 2020-21 Rangers mostly have been addressed, as evidenced by their three consecutive come-from-behind victories against Pittsburgh.
Sure, young players have continued to mature — as they likely would have under Davidson, Gorton and Quinn — but the new roster was grittier, more resilient and better balanced.
Quinn was hired in part to usher an extremely young team along. Gerard Gallant, an old-school hockey guy through and through, was hired to close the deal.
Even with Sunday night's win, the Rangers’ transition is not fully complete. They have retained some of their 2020-21 tendency for panache over purpose, and their defensive focus ebbs and flows.
But the core mission has been accomplished. As Ryan Strome said after the front office housecleaning last year, "That message has been sent and received. We’ve just got to get into the playoffs."
Of course, it never is that simple, and when the Rangers fell behind 3-1 in the series after a 7-2 loss in Pittsburgh in Game 4, the narrative went sideways.
Would the Rangers really bow out quietly against a team that was going mostly with a third-string goalie and lost superstar Sidney Crosby for half of Game 5 and all of Game 6?
And with their own rising superstar goalie Igor Shesterkin getting pulled from two games in a row while being taunted mercilessly by fans in Pittsburgh?
They did not, thanks to back-to-back 5-3 victories after facing back-to-back 2-0 deficits in those games.
So it was back to MSG for the first Game 7 there since the 2015 Eastern Conference finals against the Lightning, and an overtime thriller that they trailed with fewer than six minutes left in regulation time before a tying goal by Mika Zibanejad.
The crushing 2-0 loss that night in 2015 was the last huge moment of the Henrik Lundqvist era, and fans waited seven years for another crack at the sport’s highest drama — albeit two rounds earlier than the last one.
They got plenty of drama. Nothing beats a Game 7, especially for a franchise that had to re-find its way in a new decade after a heck of a 2010s, and now the Rangers are 3-0 in overtime Game 7s at home.
Where do the Rangers go from here? To Raleigh, for a second-round series against the Hurricanes.
Whether their road ends there or beyond, the immediate future looks bright.
The best-case scenario for New York-area hockey fans would be for the aging Islanders to retool and reset under a new coach and have both teams in the playoffs in 2022-23 — preferably against each other at some point for the first time since 1994, an extraordinarily long stretch for teams in the same division.
Bottom line: This is a good time to be a fan of hockey in the metropolitan area, no matter which team you root for.
Would the Rangers’ end of it have played out this way had ownership not acted quickly and decisively after back-to-back embarrassments against the Islanders and Capitals late last season?
We do not know, and never will. All that we do know is that the 2021-22 Rangers compiled 110 regular-season points and came back from a 3-1 series deficit to win Game 7 on Sunday night.
In the bottom-line world in which they operate, that validates the events of last May.
The Broadway Blueshirts are back on center stage, where they and their fans expect them to be.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
