Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. Spare a thought for anyone you may know who’s a fan of both the Yankees and Rangers.
In today’s SI:AM:
🏈 Inside Mahomes’s three-peat pursuit
🐘 The Mets’ elephant in the room
🐏 Why BB to UNC makes sense
Usually it’s the Knicks who are this dysfunctional
The two teams that share Madison Square Garden had very different nights on Monday. While the New York Knicks prevailed in a wild fourth quarter that saw 11 lead changes and came away with a 113–108 win over the Toronto Raptors on the road, the Rangers fell flat in a 2–1 loss at home to the Chicago Blackhawks.
Dropping a game at home against a spiraling Blackhawks team was the cherry on top of a terrible stretch for the Rangers, who have now lost eight of their last 10 after winning 12 of their first 17. Chicago entered the game with the worst record in the NHL, having lost 11 of its last 14 and fired its coach just four days earlier. It should have been an opportunity for a team that entered the season with Stanley Cup aspirations to get back on track. Instead, a lack of effort spelled defeat.
“The execution was off all night,” Rangers coach Peter Laviolette said. “Could be fatigue, could be mental, could be anything. Regardless, it’s unacceptable. We’ve got to be better than that. You’re not going to win hockey games if you can’t execute. We haven’t talked about that much, but tonight, execution was clearly won with the puck. We couldn’t make five-foot passes or connect on a 20-foot pass or coming out of D-zone coverage or in the offensive zone, just couldn’t connect on our plays.”
It was the second straight night that Laviolette was critical of his team’s execution.
“If you go back and look at it, the chances, all of them were the goals,” he said after Sunday’s loss to the Seattle Kraken. “At those points in the game, we needed to defend better than what we did. We had the pieces in place, and it just was a little bit too loose. That looseness cost us.”
The Seattle loss was even more embarrassing than Monday night’s defeat. The Rangers took a 3–1 lead in that one before allowing five unanswered goals en route to a 7–5 defeat. Unfortunately for them, that’s the sort of hockey they’ve been playing lately. Nothing has gone right for the Rangers over the past two-and-a-half weeks. The Rangers have been out-scored 40–25 over their past 10 games, and their -15 goal differential over that stretch is the worst in the NHL by a margin of five goals.
It’s a staggering fall for a team that finished with the best record in the league last season and has reached the conference finals in two of the past three years. But the rough stretch might make sense when you consider the sort of uncertainty surrounding the team right now. New York general manager Chris Drury sent a memo to the league’s other 31 teams Nov. 24 saying that the Rangers were ready to entertain trade offers, particularly for veterans Jacob Trouba and Chris Kreider. Arthur Staple of The Athletic speculated that the memo was more likely to be an effort to motivate players and reported that Drury held meetings with Kreider, Trouba and other veterans after news of the memo had leaked.
“If Drury’s league-wide trade call was meant as a message, those meetings were probably necessary to ensure the team can stay together and not fracture,” Staple wrote.
It didn’t work. Drury traded Trouba—the team’s captain—on Friday, and the Rangers have now lost six of eight since Drury sent the memo. Whether the team’s struggles are a result of a failed motivational gambit by the GM or not, it’s clear that something is broken for a team that was supposed to be one of the league’s best.
The best of Sports Illustrated
- The cover story from the latest issue of Sports Illustrated is Greg Bishop’s profile of Patrick Mahomes and his down-to-earth brilliance.
- The Mets haven’t officially signed Juan Soto, which made their media availabilities at the MLB winter meetings on Monday a little tricky. Stephanie Apstein was there and wrote about how they avoided the elephant in the room.
- For our continuing year-end series “The Best Thing I Saw in 2024,” Jon Wertheim looks back on Novak Djokovic’s dramatic gold medal victory.
- Pat Forde explains why Bill Belichick coaching North Carolina makes more sense than you might think.
- Kevin Sweeney tried to predict when each of the eight remaining undefeated men’s basketball teams will suffer their first loss.
- John Schwarb, Bob Harig and Jeff Ritter debated whether Scottie Scheffler could make a run at one of Tiger Woods’s records.
- Conor Orr moved the Bills up in his NFL power rankings, even after their shootout loss to the Rams.
The top five…
… things I saw last night:
This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | A Stanley Cup Contender in Free Fall.
