How they make playoffs<\/p>\n
As mentioned, a better home record is a must, and goalie Igor Shesterkin<\/a>\u00a0also has to be a Vezina Trophy candidate. New York’s new second defense pair of Durzi and Pettersson must be formidable, playing strong minutes behind the top pair of Adam Fox<\/a>\u00a0and Vladislav Gavrikov<\/a>. Noah Laba<\/a> has to step up and log some of the tough minutes that center Vincent Trocheck<\/a>\u00a0used to play for the Rangers, including on defensive-zone draws and the penalty kill. Dorofeyev has to be one of the League’s top goal-scorers, and Gabe Perreault<\/a>\u00a0has to build on his strong finish to last season, when he had 19 points (nine goals, 10 assists) in the last 23 games. On top of all of that, the Rangers have to raise the bar early in games. They can’t chase the game as often as they did last season, when they were tied for 20th in first-period goal differential (minus-11). They were minus-14 overall, which shows that they improved as the game went along, but 32 times they entered the first intermission on the wrong side of the scoreboard. They came back to win only five of those games (5-22-5). The League average for games trailing after the first period was 26.5. Flipping their first periods into a positive goal differential will lead to a better chance of being a playoff team, provided they can maintain consistency as the game progresses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How they make playoffs As mentioned, a better home record is a must, and goalie Igor Shesterkin\u00a0also has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":855182,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-855181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=855181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/855181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/855182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=855181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=855181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=855181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}