Despite the talent and precision that has pushed the unit to the No. 1 overall ranking earlier this season — and despite his team’s current five-game winning streak — Peter Laviolette knows the Rangers still need to sort out their suddenly ineffective power play.
And he fully believes they will.
The Rangers are presently in an 0-for-17 rut with the man-advantage entering Thursday’s home game against the Canadiens.
They haven’t scored a power-play goal in seven games since Jan. 21 against Anaheim to drop their overall percentage to fifth-best in the NHL at 25.6 percent, down from 28.7 percent before the recent slippage.
“I think stretches are always challenging, they’re always topics of discussion. I can tell you that I have a tremendous amount of confidence in the guys that are on the ice,” Laviolette said after practice Wednesday in Tarrytown. “Like anything, there’s a funk that can go on. Our job is to figure out that funk.
“And I have tremendous confidence in the guys that they will. They’re talented players, they’ve been together a long time, and we’ve gotta work our way out of it.”
Laviolette briefly broke up his longtime top power-play unit in Monday’s 2-0 win against the Flames, before he reunited the quintet of Adam Fox, Artemi Panarin, Chris Kreider, Mika Zibanejad and Vincent Trocheck late in the game.
Four of those players also worked together during five-on-four and four-on-three drills in practice Wednesday, although Kreider was excused for personal reasons.
“I think that the guys that took us to the numbers that you’re talking about are the ones that should be out there. But we do need things to happen, too,” Laviolette said. “That’s why you look at it and say maybe we’ll change it for a game and see where it goes, but those players are the players, the guys, that should be on the ice to try and make a difference.
“They’ve had a ton of success. They’ve had success for us this year. We’ve gotta get them back on track.”
Trocheck, who represented the Rangers at the All-Star Game along with goalie Igor Shesterkin, is tied for the team lead with Panarin and Kreider with nine power-play goals apiece, followed by Zibanejad’s seven.
Fox, the 2021 Norris Trophy-winning defenseman, has three with 17 assists, but no other player on the roster has netted more than Alexis Lafreniere’s two goals in man-up situations.
“Sometimes the puck goes in the net, and sometimes it doesn’t,” Trocheck said. “We’re getting a lot of chances that aren’t going in, when earlier in the year, there sometimes were fewer chances and they were going in.
“I think it’s just not worrying about and avoiding questions like this. The more you focus on it, the more it’s gonna eat at you or you’re gonna grip the stick tighter. It’s times like this whenever you’re not scoring on the power play, you worry about scoring on the power play and you’re focusing on doing so many different things, when in reality, what we do typically works. So we just gotta stick with it.”
The previous time the Blueshirts faced the Canadiens, they suffered a 4-3 shootout loss in Montreal on Jan. 6, early on during the team’s 5-7-2 slide in January.
But the Rangers righted themselves with a 7-2 road win over the Senators in the final game of the month before the All-Star break to ignite their current winning streak — in which they have outscored their opponents 18-7 despite the poor power-play performance.
“It wasn’t a great month for us, and so that game [in Montreal] obviously didn’t go the way we wanted it to on the scoreboard,” Laviolette said. “There were a lot of good things we did inside the game, the goaltender [veteran backup Jonathan Quick] played a heck of a game that night, but we were left on the short end of the stick. It’s a chance to right a wrong [Thursday].”
