The first 31 games comprise a fair enough sample size from which to deduce that in a league filled with flawed teams, the Rangers are less flawed than most and have better goaltending than just about all of them.
That’s an equation that explains why last night’s 4-1 victory over the Devils in Newark propelled the Rangers to 11 games over NHL .500 at 19-8-4, the third-best such mark in the East and tied for fifth-best in the NHL.
Still, other than the excellence in nets from the Henrik Lundqvist-Martin Biron tandem, Marian Gaborik’s resumption of the role of the Great Gabby after spending 2010-11 as a Clark Kent on skates and the club’s marked ability to hang in and find ways to win in matches where victories are perhaps not otherwise wholly earned, there is still a sense of: “Is that all there is?”
Then again, with goaltending performances as routinely superior as the one turned in last night by Lundqvist, who was a fortress of solitude in repelling the Devils’ wave throughout the first half of the match when his teammates could barely get out of their own way, let alone their own end; the finishing ability of Gaborik, who swept in the go-ahead goal early in the third and then would add an empty-netter to increase his total to 19 goals in 31 games after getting 22 in 62 a year ago; and the club’s fabric of moxie, the question of “Is that all there is?” can be answered with, “That apparently is good enough.”
That apparently is more than enough in a league that has lost — and continues to lose — a stable full of marquee athletes to the dreaded epidemic of concussions that the folks who run the show don’t have the faintest clue how to approach, let alone contain.
The administration doesn’t at all seem to recognize both the mounting public concern over the league’s failure to acknowledge the severe jeopardy into which its players are placing themselves and the growing condemnation of the league’s dismissive approach to those who fear for the athletes’ safety, even if the athletes themselves are part of the problem.
This is the worst possible time for the NHL to adopt a circle-the-wagons, us-against-the-intellectual world mentality that apparently has even infected Brendan Shanahan, the VP of Player Safety whose explanation why he did not suspend Erik Cole for his headshot in Montreal against the Devils’ Adam Larsson was nothing more than institutionalized gobbledygook.
As much as anything, parsing that incident into tenths of seconds and the slightest of movements in order to let Cole — who once sustained a broken neck on a check from behind but is as ignorantly reckless as anyone — escape scot-free is evidence the league is more interested in allowing defendants to slip through loopholes than it is in enforcing meaningful and necessary cultural changes.
The Rangers’ ability to surmount the absence of the concussed Marc Staal, their putative No. 1 defenseman who is tracking toward a return next month, is admirable. Their success in keeping the goals-against down without second-pair leader Michael Sauer is similarly worthy of praise.
But the Penguins have surmounted the absence of Sidney Crosby and the Flyers have thrived without Chris Pronger and Claude Giroux, concussion victims all. It’s the same ad nauseam around the league. If the introduction of the hard cap diluted teams, this epidemic of concussions has diluted the NHL.
Which is why a team such as the Rangers with big-time goaltending, a big-time sniper and intuitiveness can answer the question, “Is that all there is?” with the response, “That apparently is good enough.”