2:30PM: David Quinn spoke after the morning skate and said (NYR):
- On Artemi Panarin, “He’s day to day, won’t be playing tonight.”
- On Lafreniere going in his spot, “we all really feel that Laffy continues to improve, we want to put him in positions to have the success he is capable of having, we are all aware of that. I thought he had a really good game the other night, thought his third period might have been the best of the year. He’s earning everything he’s getting. I know he’s snakebitten, but he’s handling his frustration well and it’s pretty impressive how he’s handling it and he’s going to break out sooner or later, from a statistic standpoint because he is getting and creating chances, it’s just a matter of time.”
- On Colin Blackwell, “he’s good to go, he’ll be in the lineup tonight.”
- Is the idea to give Panarin some rest, “no, if he was ready to go, he was gonna go. It’s just day to day, we don’t think it’s anything serious or long-term. Unfortunately he won’t be able to go tonight, but we are hopeful for the next time we play.”
- How do you feel about the team so far, “we would like a better record and it’s funny, I think we have a similar record to what we had last year, but we all feel a lot different about our team. At this point last year our record might have been the same, maybe a little worse, and we thought we had a long way to go, a lot of things we were going to have to correct if we were going to have a chance to have success. We don’t feel that way right now, we feel we are very close, 4-5-3. We haven’t been as productive offensively as we know we are capable of being, we think that will come, but the thing we really like is that we’ve clamped down defensively, our defense has allowed us to be in game and last year we strictly relied on our offense early and if we were ever going to have success it was going to be offense driven. Right now we are doing a lot of good things from a defensive perspective, but we don’t have to sacrifice offense to play good defense, they are not tied together and I think our guys are starting to realize that. We had some great chances the other night, both goalies played great, could have been a 5-5 tie instead of a 2-2 tie going into OT. We know we have good offensive players, some of them are snakebitten, some statistically don’t have the stats they normally would have, with some of the chances we’ve had this year. We think that stuff will play itself out. The division is tough, very, very difficult, but it’s the NHL, you aren’t going to be playing high school teams, it should be tough.”
11:45AM: Artemi Panarin will miss tonight’s game against the Bruins after he suffered a lower body injury during Wednesday’s loss. (NYR)
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Panarin is being considered day to day. (Mollie Walker)
Alexis Lafreniere will take Panarin’s spot on the second line with Ryan Strome and Kaapo Kakko. (Carpiniello)
Colin Blackwell will return to the Rangers lineup after missing the last four games with an upper body injury. (NYR)
The PP units the Rangers used at their morning skate were (Stephenson):
- Mika Zibanejad, Pavel Buchnevich, Chris Kreider, Alexis Lafreniere and Adam Fox
- Ryan Strome, Kaapo Kakko, Brendan Lemieux, Jacob Trouba, K’Andre Miller
Jaro Halak will start for the Bruins. (McDonald)