Rangers’ season-long mantra of adjusting needs to be at forefront of key Game 2
NY Post
The Rangers have had a knack this season for going to school on their opponents, especially after losses, under head coach Peter Laviolette.
Well, the Blueshirts need to put those habits to work and hit the books after falling behind in the Eastern Conference Final series against the Panthers Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden, where the home team looked distressingly inferior at times in a 3-0 loss in Game 1.
“Accountability — not from me, although I can help — but from them,” Laviolette said of what’s made the team so receptive to adjustments this season. “And realizing that maybe it’s not the way we want to play or it wasn’t as clean as we would like. You go back and look at the chances [in Game 1]. It’s kind of an even game. Like, the whole thing was kind of even, it sits around the 50 percent mark.
“I just look at some of the crispness and the execution and the skating and the movements and the coverage. Not a lot, but there’s just things I felt like we could’ve done better that maybe could have pushed it in our direction. We had a lot of chances to score. I think we hit the post three times and a lot of point-blank chances, a couple on the power play, backdoor nets that were empty.
“There’s opportunities where we could’ve scored the one goal and it didn’t go. Execution on how we move out of the zone or through the neutral zone. Execution on the details of finishing.”
Tactical and systematic adjustments, both in games and between games, have been a strength of Laviolette and the Rangers.
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