Rangers playing different brand of hockey in recent surge
The Rangers haven’t wavered when describing their games for the past few weeks.Even if the results and their placement in the standings didn’t change much, they’d improved from the lowest points of their slide. “A different vibe,” Vincent Trocheck told The Post’s Larry Brooks last week. And after securing five out of a possible six points during a three-game West Coast trip, the Rangers finally have the results to back up those claims.
They’ve collected points in seven of their past eight games and enter Saturday’s match against the Blue Jackets — which starts a four-game stretch against beatable teams ahead of them in the playoff race — with a six-game point streak. “It seems like ever since Christmas,” forward Reilly Smith said Thursday after a 5-3 victory against the Utah Hockey Club, “we’re playing a different brand of hockey.” So, in a way, the Rangers are surging — relative to the rest of their season — into their next handful of games, with a chance perhaps to leapfrog teams ahead of them if they keep stringing points, and wins, together.They sit four points behind the Bruins for the second wild-card spot.Columbus, which has won six consecutive games, sits just five points ahead of the Rangers but opened the year 16-17-6.
This will be the Rangers’ first meeting against the Blue Jackets during the 2024-25 campaign, and they’ve won five of their past seven games against Columbus. Then, the Blueshirts will face the Canadiens, Senators, and Flyers, which all sit ahead of the Rangers but outside of the playoff picture.They’ve gone 4-1 in games against that trio of teams in 2024-25 and trail them by two points, two points and one point, respectively, in the wild-card chase. Even when the Rangers were in the worst of their tailspin, the logjam of teams clustered around the Eastern Conference’s wild-card spots presented an avenue for them to save their season.
To figure everything out eventually.To enter the deadlin...