4:54PM: David Quinn spoke after practice on Monday and said (NYR):

• “the key to success is everyone buying in and doing what is asked of you to do for 60 minutes. Lately we haven’t had that. It’s periodically or long stretches, that was something we talked about today. You can trust each other when you are some place and you know the other four guys are going to be in another place. The game becomes easy when there is reliability and being a great teammate. Being a great teammate isn’t going out to dinner and having a bunch of laughs, being a great teammate is knowing where the four guys on the ice are going to be when you go out there, working hard for each other.”
• On Georgiev, “he got back into his groove, played well. You will see him soon.”
• “We talked about what our problem was and how unacceptable it was. If you play in the NHL and play 20 minutes and think you are going to win you are sadly mistaken. If you are not going to have a great night it can’t be for the reasons why we didn’t have a great night last night. There was a lot of purposeless hockey.”
• “You have to want to do it. As much as we can prod and poke and demand, if I throw a puck in the corner and you are saying to yourself that you are going to battle for it because the coaches want me to, eventually you aren’t going to do it. That has to be part of your hockey DNA and we had that going on for a while and we have been inconsistent with it.”
• On Chris Kreider, “he is a guy that has been very productive point-wise, goal-wise. His last three games he played well, when he plays that simple straight line game he is a hard guy to handle and I think our guys follow that lead from him. He’s very smart and I think that sometimes he can overthink it, he and I have talked about that, he acknowledges that and sometimes it can get in his way toward being the player he needs to be. I think that he has done a really good job of not overthinking the last few games and we have seen the results.”
• On Howden, “he’s had a really good year. He’s had a downward trend like most 20-year olds do over the course of an 82 game schedule. His bad isn’t really bad, that is a thing I like about him. When he’s having an off night it’s not that bad. One of the things that I talk about with being a pro is how bad is your bad? When he hasn’t had a great night it’s like Howden hasn’t been as good as he has been and I think that is a really good sign.”
• On Boo Nieves, “he played wing which he hadn’t all-year, I wanted Lias in the middle because that is Lias’ position. I felt that after Lias sat out I wanted to get him back in the middle and in fairness to Boo, playing the wing is not something he has done in a while so we will see what we do tomorrow with that line. It’s a big jump, especially against that team. Boo does a really good job of skating fast, the next thing for him is playing fast, from play to play, thinking, recognizing situations.”
• On Boo, contact and concussions, “I didn’t see any of that last night. I haven’t noticed that.”
• Brendan Smith will get back into the lineup soon
• On Buchnevich, “he has really made great strides, he’s played really well since he’s been back. Really coachable and asking questions. We really like his approach.”
• Are you surprised at how Buch and Zucc have played, “I am surprised at how he is playing, Zucc has played well too. I think they both really worked hard when they were out so they might have been more game ready than most people because of how they worked.”

12:56PM: Henrik Lundqvist and Kevin Hayes are not practicing today for the Rangers with what the team is calling maintenance days.

On defense, Freddy Claesson might be the 7th defenseman and a healthy scratch tomorrow against the Ducks as he rotates in with Brady Skjei and Tony DeAngelo. (Stephenson)