Rangers Continue to Forget How to Kill Penalties: Stewart Makes them Pay

For the second time in three games the Rangers would take what was a game they very much had a chance to win and turn it into a loss by being outplayed in a 3^rd period.  Against certain teams and certain players you can get away with leaving a man wide open in front but a player the caliber of Chris Stewart is not going to miss those chances and he didn’t netting his 2^nd PPG of the game, 5^th of the season.  I said early in the game that I love Chris Stewart’s game and New York along with a national audience that didn’t know about him before got a lesson in the skill he has.  His first goal was a play where he outmuscled Marc Staal getting to the front of the net and converted with a beautiful deflection on the John Michael Liles shot.  The third goal was purely academic as it never felt like the Rangers were going to get a 2^nd tonight.

New York Rangers New First Line: Development Happens At It’s Own Pace

Time is one of those concepts that can be very simple in terms of the clinical amount of minutes, days, months, years something takes but also abstract in that for each person the time required in development differs.  The Rangers have been on a transition to younger players they are developing from their system and a move away from the bigger ticket items.  The key to sustainability of that kind of transition is that the players you are developing from your system must develop and show enough to produce the belief of the management the course is worth staying on.

A perfect example of the differing forms of development will be on display tonight when the Rangers and Avalanche play tonight in the Garden.  The top line for New York will consist of three homegrown players in Brandon Dubinsky, Artem Anisimov, and Ryan Callahan, who all have had a somewhat different path in developing to where they are right now.