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Rangers center Mika Zibanejad sets before a face off against...

Rangers center Mika Zibanejad sets before a face off against the Carolina Hurricanes in the third period of an NHL hockey game at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke

GREENBURGH — Mika Zibanejad was quiet. And thoughtful.

And firm.

Yes, the Rangers had a successful month of January, he said, but there are important points in the immediate future that need to be gained. Otherwise, all of what they accomplished this month will have been for naught.

“We’re trending in the right direction,” Zibanejad told Newsday after a 45-minute practice Thursday morning at the MSG Training Center. “We just got to keep going. We can’t be satisfied with how this month has been. This month is only good if we keep going in February.”

Despite back-to-back regulation losses to Colorado and Carolina to end the month, the Rangers (24-22-4) have ended January with an 8-3-3 record and gained 19 out of a possible 28 points.

For a group that entered the month  in a 4-15 slide and dropped to 16-19-1, January was a significant and needed  change.

“Everything to me says that we’re playing a better brand [of hockey] that will allow us to be successful,” coach Peter Laviolette said.

The publicly available data points support his conclusion. According to NaturalStatTrick.com, the Rangers outscored opponents 47-39 in the month and had a 159-151 advantage in high-danger chances.

“We have good goaltending,” Alexis Lafreniere said. “So if we limit chances, I like our chance to win every game.”

With 32 games remaining, Lafreniere’s theory is solid and inadvertently touches upon an inconvenient truth: The Rangers are below the Stanley Cup playoffs cut line in the Eastern Conference. Beore the start of play Thursday night, they were fifth in the Metropolitan Division, sixth in the conference's wild-card race and 12th in the conference.

Which is assuredly not where they thought they would be at this point in the season when they first congregated in mid-September for training camp.

The teams around the Rangers generally are keeping pace. Of the eight teams engaged in the sprint for the conference's two wild-card berths,  entering Thursday, Detroit had earned 19 points in January, Columbus 17, Montreal and the Islanders 16 each and Philadelphia 14. 

Boston, which has the first wild-card position, had 12 and Tampa Bay, in the second wild-card position, had 13. Pittsburgh bought up the rear with 11.

"It’s tight. It’s really tight,” Lafreniere said. “There’s so many good teams. Look at the standings. There’s a bunch of teams in there in the mix. They’re all good teams. We’re a good team. So it’s on us to get as many points as we can.”

Not simply just to qualify for the playoffs but to potentially affect team president and general manager Chris Drury’s thinking with the March 7 NHL trade deadline approaching.

The league’s nearly two-week-long pause for its 4 Nations Face-Off will give Drury and other executives time to assess their teams and to potentially make trades. In a recent email to Newsday, NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly wrote that he did not “anticipate implementing a roster freeze during 4 Nations.”

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