Vincent Trocheck starting to get into the swing of things for Rangers

Sometimes, it doesn’t click right away with a new team. It takes a little time to adjust, to feel comfortable.

That’s how it was with Vincent Trocheck when he came to the Rangers. He didn’t make immediate magic with his new linemate, Artemi Panarin, and he struggled adapting to the Rangers’ defensive system, which was based on zone concepts, as opposed to the man-to-man he’d played with the Hurricanes in Carolina.

But as the Rangers kicked off their post-Christmas schedule Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden against Alexander Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals, things were coming around for Trocheck, as they have been for the Rangers.

“It took a little adjusting in the beginning of the year, and the team was struggling a little bit, but it seems like we're finding our stride the last few weeks,’’ Trocheck said after the Rangers’ morning skate Thursday.

The Rangers had won eight of their last nine games before the Christmas break, and Trocheck, who’d signed a seven-year, $39.375 million contract with the Rangers as a free agent during the summer, finished out the pre-Christmas schedule on a six-game point streak, in which he had three goals and seven assists.

In that period, he’d also played to a plus/minus rating of plus-4, which brought his season’s plus/minus figure down to a minus-5, after he’d been a minus-9 in the season’s first 29 games. Before the break, Rangers coach Gerard Gallant explained that Trocheck had struggled coming from Carolina’s man-to-man system, into the Rangers’ zone system. He’d seen Trocheck doing too much chasing of opposing players in the early going, he said.

Trocheck agreed.

“Yeah, yeah, for sure,’’ he said. “You get used to playing a certain way for the last two-and-a-half, three years. When you play man-to-man, you're sticking with a guy you get onto whenever you come into the ‘D’ zone. If you lose that guy, then it's usually in trouble in a man-to-man system.

“To come into a zone (system), and having that in the back of your head, like 'I can't leave my guy,' realistically, you don't have a guy,’’ he said. “You're playing, kind of, centerfield, as a centerman. So you’ve got to get used to being able to let that one guy go, and find someone else, and kind of stay in the middle.’’

Once he finally was able to shed his habit of playing defense the Carolina way, that helped him at that end of the ice, Trocheck said. Meanwhile, at the other end, his separation from Panarin, and his placement between his youth hockey teammate Jimmy Vesey and fellow Boston guy Chris Kreider, is helping as well.

Trocheck has talked about how, style-wise, he finds it easier to play with Kreider and Vesey, who are straight-line, north-south players, as he is. And the numbers seem to reflect that. As a duo, the combination of Trocheck and Panarin, with a number of different right wings, had been outscored 14-11 and outshot 165-134 in 301:27 of 5-on-5 ice time, according to the analytics website Natural Stat Trick.

Meanwhile the line of Kreider, Trocheck and Vesey had played 87:03 at 5-on-5, and while the trio had been outshot 40-35, it had outscored opponents 4-3, and had one more scoring chance (31-30) and one more high-danger chance (13-12) than opponents. The line also had a slightly higher Expected Goals For rate (2.74) than Expected Goals Against rate (2.52), according to the site.

Whether the four days off over Christmas will might serve to cool the Rangers down a little or not, Trocheck said he was confident the team is beginning to live up to its preseason expectations.

“I think that the firepower is there,’’ he said. “The ability to score four or five goals in the game is starting to come out now. Our power play's been playing really well. I think this team is starting to pull together at both ends of the Ice.’’

By Colin Stephenson

colin.stephenson@newsday.comColinSNewsday

Colin Stephenson covers the Rangers for Newsday. He has spent more than two decades covering the NHL and just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.