They say that if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. The way they played on Wednesday night, the Rangers couldn't make it in a beer league rink in Binghamton. Facing the Ottawa Senators at home, the worst team in the Eastern Conference took its fifth straight loss, its eighth defeat of its last nine, and its second utter humiliation in its last three outings. Maybe that 10-2 loss in Boston looks a little worse as a final, but last night's 8-4 clowning—in which the Sens held a 6-0 lead in the second period—was the bed of nails that awaited the Rangers after a long and dramatic fall from the Presidents' Trophy–winning season of two years ago.
If you were lucky enough not to catch the game, here's what happened: Ottawa scored, and then they scored, and then they scored, and then they scored, and then they took a break and all the New Yorkers booed the Rangers, and then Ottawa came back out and scored twice more. Poor old Jonathan Quick, who might be starting to worry about getting his Hall of Fame ticket canceled, got pulled after goal No. 6 and from there the Rangers found a few ways to beat Ottawa's Leevi Merilainen and give whoever stayed at the Garden a dead-cat bounce to cheer.
New York's J.T. Miller was asked, essentially, if it's depressing to be down 4-0 in the first period of a hockey game. "No shit," he said.
It's going quite badly. The Times is calling the Rangers "pathetic." The Post is saying they're "gutless." The Canadian national broadcaster, which usually does not editorialize, is describing them as "feeble." And I don't even want to know what words were used on the escalators at MSG around 8:30 p.m. last night.
The Ottawa Senators on the second night of a back-to-back are not the kind of team that should be causing anyone this much trouble. They have plenty of their own problems to worry about, specifically when it comes to giving up bushels of goals. So I imagine it was nice for them to look across to the other bench and think, "Hey, at least we're not those chumps."
Several years back, during the bubble season when all the Canadian teams stayed in Canada, I had some fun with the Sens being the kind of group bad enough to be embarrassing to lose to, but scrappy enough to make it plausible. In that era, they served as an angel of death for a number of on-the-hot-seat opposing coaches. If a big shake-up wasn't already planned for the Rangers ahead of the Olympic break, this Sens-ing should make it all but inevitable. Start spreading the news: Someone's leaving today.
