The New York Rangers’ struggles continue as the Blueshirts suffered a 5-1 loss to the Calgary Flames on Sunday night.
Throughout the entirety of the 2024-25 season and to start the 2025-26 season, the Rangers have struggled to open up games.
It’s been a common theme for the Rangers to start off first periods flat, and it was no different on Sunday night.
The Flames jumped off to a quick 2-0 lead less than 10 minutes into the contest, which put the Rangers on their heels for the remainder of the night.
“We are getting outplayed in the beginning of the games,” J.T. Miller said. “If we could come out ready and start from there, not have to fix a thousand things, maybe that would be better…
“We were ready to go, we were chomping at the bit to get this road trip started, and then, it’s so frustrating to come out flat on the road when you know they just need a win, and so do we. That’s the frustrating part. If you lose the game, you can sleep at night playing the right way, playing hard, and just not getting the result. We were flat for 20 minutes today and it cost us.”
The Rangers provided somewhat of a pushback after a disastrous start, but it was their defensive woes that haunted them throughout the night.
Mike Sullivan has tried to instill a new defensive identity into this Rangers team.
Last year, the Rangers’ tendencies to give up odd-man rushes, turnovers, and a general lack of defensive awareness were their Achilles' heel.
To start this season, the Rangers seemed to be improving from a defensive standpoint, while turning the page on their past failures in that area, but recently, those same issues have suddenly crept back into their game.
Between the turnovers and defensive breakdowns, Sullivan was not happy with what he saw from his team in Calgary.
“It's getting away from us because we're getting away from a team game,” Sullivan said. “For the majority of the year, I think we've – from a defensive standpoint – done a pretty good job as far as being hard to play against. The last couple of outings, not so much. And it's the same group of guys with the same concept. So we've got to do a better job, all of us as a group, and just making sure we get back to understanding what that game looks like.”
Now, the Rangers sit with a 3-5-2 record to open up the season and have lost three straight games.
It’s certainly not the place that neither the players nor Sullivan envisioned being in during a training camp where all the right things were being said and the team appeared to be taking steps toward a complete identity shift.
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Sullivan’s words of encouragement have drastically changed with the Rangers continuing to struggle.
“We're not at our best right now, and we've got to find a way to dig our way out of it,” Sullivan emphasized. “I just think it starts with effort and just attention to detail on the defensive side. I thought for a lot of this year, we had done a real good job at controlling the defensive side of the puck and limiting not only quality of chances, but quantity of chances.
“I thought tonight, the types of mistakes we made, they're egregious, they're really hard to recover from, and we gave them some pretty good looks as a result.”
The Rangers will be back in action on Tuesday night against the Vancouver Canucks.