Artemi Panarin on the left, Vincent Trocheck and Alexis Lafreniere on the right. Chris Kreider and Mika Zivagined line up next to each other. Filip Chytil is on the right with trusty buddy Kaapo Kakko and Will Caille on the left. Johnny Brodzinski spins between Matt Rempe and Jimmy Vesey. Adam Fox and Ryan Lindgren are back together, Braden Schneider is with K'Andre Miller and Jacob Trouba is skating to the right of Zach Jones.
Fast-paced combat training.
The 23-man national team is on the ice at the Rangers' practice rink.
It might have been April.
It could have been the playoffs.
It was Friday.
It was the second day of the training camp.
“It was actually tough for us, especially the first practice,” Panarin said after a double session in which the group spent nearly 90 minutes on the ice, with the final 30 minutes spent in the system. “It was good to have the system practice. It made it a little easier.”
“But everything is 100 percent.”
There were 13 forwards on the ice for the national team. Riley Smith and Sam Carrick were the only rookies, filling in for Jack Roslovic and Barclay Goodrow. Ben Harper and Connor McKee skated as the fourth pairing in a group of eight defensemen.
It's the second day of the 2024-25 season, but it looks like it's the 300th day of the 2023-24 season. It feels less like a new year and more like a continuation of last year. It was like this from 2013-14 to 2015-16, when Alain Vigneault was on the bench and the club made few personnel changes from one year to the next. The Blueshirts always seemed to pick up where they left off.
“It's probably a bit of both going on at the same time,” coach Peter Laviolette said. “There's definitely a desire to be better than last year. I think that desire is definitely there. We have new guys here. We have guys that aren't here anymore. We have guys that want to continue how they played last year and want to work harder. And then maybe some guys that didn't perform as well as they wanted to last year and want to get back on track.”
“So I think it could be both. This is a new team. I feel like this is a new year. This group was together last year. That's just a fact of life. There was some success. We want to build on that, but this is a new group.”
The Rangers will play six preseason games, starting Sunday in Boston, giving some of their top prospects a chance to shine. With a mixed group along the way, young players like Brennan Osman, Adam Edstrom and Brett Berard will have a chance to prove themselves alongside the veterans in the practice squads.
Edstrom could have a chance to make the team if the team had 14 forwards, but he probably won't need to if he finishes camp fully healthy. There could be competition for the seventh defenseman position, including Harper, McKee, Chad Ruhwedel and Matthew Robertson. Ruhwedel, incidentally, is the only player on the playoff roster who didn't skate with the national team on Friday. He wasn't the kind of player to be out of breath after such an intense workout.
“I've been running training camp the same way for a while now. It's a training camp, so it's pretty fast paced. I don't like to stop and go to the boards. I don't like to slow down,” Laviolette said. “I want to keep going. It's about getting in conditioning. It's about getting in match shape and skating shape.”
“Also, some of the structured stuff we put in, if you see it or hear it again in two, three, four months, you forget it. It could just be the wording. It could be what you want in your drills or your system. It could be what you want in your game plan.”
“It's not that the players don't understand or don't get it,” the coach said, “they do, but we're going to do the exact same practice again in a few days and try to get better.”
Oh, I'm so happy.
But will it be 8:30am again?
That's my question, by the way, not the players'.
This could have been April, but it's not. This looks like last year's team, but it's not. The Rangers laid the foundation last year. They thought they had laid the foundation for the 2021-22 season, but one season later they won 10 of their first 26 games.
“One plus one doesn’t necessarily equal two, you know,” LaViolette asked rhetorically. “One good thing doesn’t necessarily lead to another good thing.
“You've got to go out there every day and work for it. You've got to go out there every day and fight for it. Today was good. Really good. I thought practice was sharp, competitive and fast. It was a good day.”
“They will be vaccinated again tomorrow.”
Of course that will be the case.
It's training camp. Peter Laviolette.
