The Rangers’ carelessness on the ice in Washington on Tuesday was matched by the Yankees’ negligence on the field in The Bronx the following night.
That and $2.90 apiece will get the Blueshirts a subway ride to the Garden for Friday’s match against a young and hungry squad from Ottawa.
The misadventure in D.C. that resulted in a cosmetically close 5-3, empty-net abetted defeat — the award-winning cosmetician went by the name of Igor Shesterkin — seems to have caught everyone’s attention after head coach Peter Laviolette made an unsolicited reference to the club’s (lack of) attitude immediately following the match.
“We have addressed it,” Braden Schneider told The Post following Thursday’s on-point practice. “We know what our standard is. You want to work at the level to compete for the Stanley Cup.
“If you’re not coming to the rink prepared to work, if you just think you’re going to just walk in and score six goals off your talent, you’re not going to have a chance to win. And I think we have addressed that.
“Everyone in here knows what needs to be done and we know we need to be better,” said No. 4. That wasn’t us the other night.”
The problem is that the mirror doesn’t lie like a 6-2-1 record might.
Through the first month of the season, the Rangers are in the NHL’s nether regions when it comes to nearly every meaningful available metric relating to defense.
It’s almost staggering.
The Blueshirts allow the sixth-most attempts at five-on-five and the eighth-most shots per 60:00.
They have the fifth-worst expected goals ratio, they have allowed the sixth-most scoring chances and the fourth-most high-danger chances.
Yet because Shesterkin and Jonathan Quick have been almost uniformly brilliant in recording the third-best save percentage at five-on-five, the club’s goals against is third best.
That has camouflaged the number of breakdowns, mental blunders and general chaos in the D-zone the way that smacking multiple home runs can camouflage baserunning and fielding errors. Thing is, it doesn’t last forever.
And by the way, there is no time like the present for the Rangers to button it down for the Senators, who enter this match as the NHL’s third-highest scoring team at 4.23 goals per after having gone for eight goals twice, five goals once and four goals three times over their last seven games.
In order to do that, the club has to improve on both its attention to detail and engagement. Laviolette cited a lack of “pop” both after the defeat to the Caps, whom his team had swept in last year’s opening round, and the Oct. 24 Garden defeat to the Panthers, by whom the team had been eliminated in the Eastern final.
Without pop, it is difficult to snap and crackle on attention to detail.
“If you lack attitude, you have no chance of having any details. Last game was an example that we just weren’t where we needed to be to have a chance at winning, other than Shesty,” Schneider said. “I think we came out flat and they came out wanting to prove something. I think that was the main difference.
“Attitude comes first. You can win a game purely on winning battles, you don’t need to zero in on details if you win every puck battle, know what I mean?”
Schneider will skate on the left side of the third pair with Vincent Mancini for the second straight match. Laviolette split the K’Andre Miller-Adam Fox and Ryan Lindgren-Jacob Trouba tandems in the third period in D.C. while falling back to the traditional Lindgren-Fox, Miller-Trouba pairs that had been intact for the previous four seasons but there were Miller-Fox and Lingren-Trouba together at practice.
“We talked about moving things around starting with Key and Foxy,” the coach said. “They’ve been a pretty good pair, their numbers and what they do on the ice.
“The other night was just a reflection of us just not being here, so we have to bounce back and right that. In the bigger picture, the pairs that have been together have done a pretty good job. But I would never take out a pen and write anything down with a permanent marker.”
You can inscribe this, however, into a stone with a chisel, and that is if the Rangers do not tighten it up with and without the puck, they are not going to continue on a 118-point pace.
“Every once in a while you address it and move on,” Laviolette said. “We’ve addressed some things.
“Practice and the effort from the players was outstanding.”
