How can you not be proud of this team? They battle tooth and nail, and never say die. I will have a comprehensive writeup later tonight (gotta talk with fellow Yankee fans about Clemens at the moment). I hope you guys enjoyed the ride. I know I sure did!
Join in with your fellow Ranger fans and salute this team.
Update:
Ok, so I have had some time to sit back and reflect, and I figure, now is not the time to encapsulate this season. It is probably more prudent to just look back at this game, as I have done all year, and leave that for another time. In that spirit I have sort of mapped out how I want to run this site this offseason (of course you should be coming here at least once a week as I plan to have posts every other day or so). First I will do a player by player review, analyzing certain matrices of a good player, and rating their individual seasons based on what I see out there rather than cold hard fact. My goal is to start day after tomorrow with Michal Rozsival, and continue all the way till I reach Nylander (going by jersey number). Once I do that I plan to analyze the coaches, the season as a whole, then the wolfpack. Hopefully that will carry us through till draft day, then till the signing period, and so on. In short, it will be a busy offseason here at Rangers Review, so don’t delete that bookmark juuuuuust yet.
So, with regards to the final game of our season, how did it go? Well, it was kind of a seesaw.
The first period was more or less even, despite the Sabres holding most of the play, the Rangers took the lead, hence the evenness. The second was entirely the Sabres as they outscored the Rangers 4-1 in that period alone, and the 3rd was clearly all Rangers. Just like this entire series, this game could have gone either way. It’s hard to call the Rangers out for 1 bad period, but really that is what it boiled down to. They thought they could play the Sabres style, and it blew up in their faces. As Sam Weinman mentioned, it looked like they were trying to do too much, which was causing them to be out of position, and causing rushes the other way with numbers.
Remember my pre-game words of wisdom?
Play smart, stay within yourself, and leave it all on the ice…
Sadly the rangers didnt do any of these things, save the last. They certainly tried hard at the end, but they didnt really give it their all from the get go. It’s hard to blame them, game 5 was just brutal for them to take, but it’s hockey, and you have to move on.
I am not going to recap the series, its not really worth your while, I mean, we all know how this series could have been OVER in game 5, we all know how badly the reffing screwed us this series, we all know the Rangers played with pride, and nearly overcame all obstacles.
This is why I am please with the outcome, and this is why, we salute you.
-Inferno