3:34PM: David Quinn spoke after practice and said (NYR):

• On Lemieux and Zibanejad not practicing, “They were both maintenance days, I think they’ll both be fine moving forward.”
• On Lemieux and Zibanejad’s injuries, “lower body for Lemieux and upper and lower for Mika, but both were maintenance days and they’ll be ready to go for Friday.”

• On moving players around at practice, “that was just for today, two guys out of the lineup, you kind of mix and match and I wanted to take a look at a couple of things too, or we wanted to take a look at a few things.”
• On playing on the road with no fans, “Obviously when you have a crowd in the building it changes the whole dynamic of the game, so I do think it will make a little bit of a difference, but hopefully, one of the things we were pretty good at in the second half of the year, we were a pretty good road team. Hopefully we can continue that trend we started last year.”
• On Ryan Strome’s start, “Stromer is still trying to find his game, I know he’s not happy with the way things have gone, it is three games, but we need him to be on top of his game if we are going to have a chance to play.”
• On Alexei Lafreniere, “I just thought other guys were playing a little bit better than Laffy, it’s not an indication of what we think of him and he’s right back where…he’s going to be on one of those top-two lines and get plenty of ice time. It was really more circumstantial, I thought Chytil was playing well, Kakko was playing well. Obviously the PPs, I think we had two PPs in the last 10 minutes, so I think that played a little bit of a role in it. It was really more circumstantial, it wasn’t that I sat there and said I’m not putting him out there, I think the PPs had something to do with it and Chytil and Kakko were going pretty good. That is really what it was, it wasn’t anything I consciously did, it was the two PPs in the last 10 minutes and some other guys that I thought had a little bit of jump, just went in that direction.”
• Will DeAngelo be back in the lineup, “We haven’t made that final decision, we will make that decision tomorrow after practice.”

1:45PM: Mika Zibanejad didn’t skate at Rangers practice today, but David Quinn said that he expects Zibanejad to play on Friday against Pittsburgh. (NYR)

Zibanejad lost an edge and went crashing into the boards during the third period last night and did not play the final 2:42.

Brendan Lemieux also did not skate, but is expected to play on Friday, as well. (NYR)