praise<\/a>\u2014even as \u0160mits searches for his first NHL point\u2014suggests the team sees promise in him. He’s also the first 18-year-old defenseman to play for the Rangers since Dave Maloney in 1974.<\/p>\n\u0160mits is an incredibly intelligent, detail-oriented player. He processes the game at a high level, which should help him continue to improve. He’s still making mistakes, but his decisiveness helps limit their impact: He commits to his reads rather than compounding an error with hesitation. <\/p>\n
With all of that in mind, the Rangers could put him in a better position to succeed. He’s struggling alongside Braden Schneider, and an extended run with a different defense partner would give us a better sense of what he can do. He doesn’t look overwhelmed, which is encouraging as he adjusts to the NHL. But the Rangers can’t simply count on him to figure it out; they need to help him along rather than say, “Oh, he’ll be fine,” and carry on. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This isn’t the start we wanted to see from Alberts \u0160mits, but some of that comes down to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":901272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-901271","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\/901271","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=901271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/901271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/901272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=901271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=901271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=901271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}