Artemi Panarin stood outside the Tarrytown locker room on Tuesday afternoon, the Rangers’ disbanding day after falling just a few days earlier from falling short of two wins in the Eastern Conference finals, and talked about how good the team was doing just a month ago, going 7-0 in the playoffs.
I felt confident.
The power play was unstoppable.
The Blueshirts were in great form.
“I felt a lot of confidence in our team, especially when we were up 3-0 against Carolina,” Panarin said, “and that changed the course of the series against Florida.”
Then, as the Hurricanes picked up momentum heading into Games 5 and 6, the reality of how difficult it is to reach the Stanley Cup Final became clear.
The Rangers also won in the second round, but the Panthers, a bigger, stronger and better team, ultimately proved to be an insurmountable obstacle.
But there’s no doubt that a turnaround from strong starts by some of the team’s most important players played a major role in the Blueshirts’ failure to overcome a tough conference finale for the second time in three years.
“I wish I could have scored 15 goals, but [didn’t]”Panarin scored four game-winning goals in the first seven games, but didn’t score in the final nine until 1:40 left in Game 6, when they had already lost,” Panarin said.
Panarin doesn’t have the same feeling he did after a locker-room cleaning day last year when he was held to zero goals and two assists in the Rangers’ seven-game first-round loss to the Devils, but the Russian star winger is hoping that perception will change as well.
Unfortunately, in a city with fans hungry for a championship, only the Stanley Cup can change the landscape.
Despite playing much better in the postseason this season, Panarin’s ineffectiveness as the Rangers thrived provided yet another summer story of him not delivering when it mattered most.
He never got a hold of the puck in the series against the Panthers, and as a result, he wasn’t able to make the same game-by-game impact he had during the regular season, when he scored a career-high 120 points.
But Panarin was far from alone.
Mika Zibandeged was held scoreless in 14 of the Rangers’ 16 playoff games, including just three total in the playoffs this season, and Jacob Trouba also struggled mightily, turning over the puck and making poor defensive decisions.
“I thought the first two series were good,” Gibanjade said of the playoffs. “Obviously, the series with the Panthers was a tough one for most of the game. [Aleksander[] “Barkov just won the Selke Trophy. I knew it was going to be a tough matchup, so I was going to try to go out there and attack. The way I play it, if our offense isn’t going to work, I’m going to make sure we close them down defensively.”
“And then at five-on-five, I don’t think they scored any goals on us either, so we kind of cancelled each other out. Right now I can’t look at the lack of victory as a positive, but at the same time, at the end of the day, there’s always another day and thinking about what we could have done differently, that’s in the past now. I can only think about what we can do in the future.”
“Obviously, I think points-wise this season hasn’t been bad. Obviously it wasn’t at the level it was at before. But that’s sport. You’re not trying to do something different, you’re trying to do the same thing and you’re trying to do whatever you can to make that happen. There are some years when it’s not going to happen.”
Trouba said he missed 11 straight games after breaking his ankle in March.
It was an unusual injury for the Rangers captain to return from, given that a kidney-sized chunk had come off his ankle.
The aftereffects of the injury certainly played a role in demoting him to a last-place defenseman, but he said he got better as the playoffs went on.
“We had good moments and bad moments,” Trouba said of how he assessed his game. “There were times I thought we played great and there were times where we obviously made mistakes. That goes on and on. I thought as a team we were in the right spot. That’s kind of the message that everybody is feeling.”
“It wasn’t by chance. You look back two years ago, three years ago, we got there. But I think this year we felt like we deserved to be there and we should be there. That’s how we’ll feel going forward.”
