The bad news for the members of the Rangers’ vaunted power-play unit: they are about to face a high-end, aggressive penalty kill that includes Selke Trophy candidates at forward and a deep, physical defense.
The good news: it’s nothing they haven’t seen before.
And it’s nothing they haven’t had success against in the past.
Indeed, the adjustment from seeing Carolina’s penalty kill in the second round to seeing Florida’s in the third is not much of an adjustment at all, according to Peter Laviolette.
And the Panthers, who finished the regular season ranked sixth on the PK, would look a lot scarier if the Rangers hadn’t just finished a series against the league’s best four-on-five unit.
“There are vast differences between some teams. I don’t think it’s that different between these two teams,” Laviolette said after the Rangers finished practice on Monday. “This is another team that has an aggressive mindset. When we’re referencing Carolina and Florida, I think they’re different teams. The way they try to defend, the way they defend on the penalty kill, has an aggressive mindset to it. And so you have to do things a certain way.
“There are other teams that defend by hunkering in and protecting seams and blocking shots. That’s a different message and a different mindset going into our power play and how we create.”
The Hurricanes eventually found that backing off — not completely but certainly more than they usually do — had more success against the Rangers than their usual modus operandi of attacking the puck and jumping into passing lanes.
Early in that series, the Rangers dominated on the power play, but after Carolina adjusted, it took until the third period of Game 6 for them to break through again.
“It was trying to slow the game down, which we don’t particularly like to do, but we got some elite skilled top-three guys in [Adam Fox], Mika [Zibanejad] and [Artemi Panarin],” Vincent Trocheck said after the Game 6 win. “Whenever we have the puck in their hands and they’re able to slow the game down, things are gonna work.”
Against Florida’s similar scheme in the regular season, the Rangers went 3-for-9 on the power play.
The Blueshirts can also be encouraged by the number of penalties the Panthers took this year — more than any team other than Anaheim.
“They get up the ice on it, too, they’re aggressive with it,” Panthers coach Paul Maurice said. “The best part of our penalty kill in the Tampa series [in the first round], we didn’t go to the box and you just gotta stay out of it.”
