Time For Accountability From Rangers Tonight

I said that I hated giving stats like that: 229 teams before this year had gone up 3-1 in a best-of-seven NHL series and only 20 had come back to win. Well the numbers have actually decreased with Anaheim and Pittsburgh advancing (231 teams have gone up 3-1, and less than 8.7% have come back to win). Well the New York Rangers are the 232nd team to go up 3-1 and they are on the verge of losing the series. And in pretty embarrassing fashion too as no one is even giving them a chance of winning this Game 7. And the biggest problem for the Rangers is that no one seems to be accepting responsibility for this.

The worst culprit of all is head coach John Tortorella. As the Rangers LoHud blog points out, Tortorella has failed to take accountability for hitting a woman in the stands for a water bottle or getting suspended for a pivotal Game 6. He didn't even want to talk about this issue. If Tortorella was on the bench, maybe the extra set of eyes would have be able to see goon Donald Brashear's pregame bump and get him out of Game 6 before it began (and before he broke Blair Betts orbital bone) or maybe the extra set of eyes would have seen Shane Morrisonn bite Brandon Dubinsky(!). But instead, the coach who has been preaching discipline and accountability, and who sat Sean Avery out of a game because of it (and has benched others as well), lost his cool at the biggest point of the season and not only refused to apologize for it, but he refused to even allow the issue to be discussed! Regardless of what happens tonight, I'm not sure his job should be secure past the end of the season after his recent actions.

But the issue goes far beyond the coach. Mark Herrmann has some candidates who need to step up and I agree with him on these three: Scott Gomez, Nik Zherdev, and Markus Naslund. There are others as well. Henrik Lundqvist has put this team on his back for years, but this year especially so. They don't play great defense in front of him and don't give him enough offense to win a lot of the time. A lot of the fault in that goes to Glen Sather who constructed this team in this way without any thought as to who exactly would put the puck in the net. And Chris Drury is a clutch player and I give him all the credit in the world for playing this series with what is probably a broken wrist, but The Captain, Mark Messier, wouldn't have stood for this bullshit.

Someone needs to step up and win this game for the Rangers. Maybe that guy is Lundqvist whose only hope might me to be "a god" although Alexander Ovechkin claimed he is not. But maybe it is some accountability from guys on the team other than Brandon Dubinsky and Ryan Callahan. Someone is going to need to step up to take the place of Blair Betts, one of their best penalty killers and an integral part of their checking line. Someone is going to need to find a way to put the puck in the net. This is the type of game that the Rangers threw all that money at Scott Gomez and Wade Redden to take over. This is the type of game where the lore of Sean Avery could grow in New York if he is able to lead them to victory. But it is time for the Rangers to step in and be accountable or else, despite that 3-1 lead and all the stats that came along with it, tonight will be the end to their season.