Time: 7:00 Eastern
Place: Madison Square Garden, New York NY
TV: BSDET, MSG
Radio: 97.1 FM The Ticket // 1270 AM
Rangers Blog: Blueshirt Banter
The Rangers float solidly above the bubble in the playoff race, as they’ve got three points on Washington for third in the Metro and 16 points to drop to Detroit before they fall out of the playoff race entirely.
But it would take an epic collapse for that to happen. Igor Shesterkin continues to be good for the team when they’re not playing as well as they could (which seems to be the concern from their fans this year).
The Rangers are 7-3-0 in their last ten, enjoy a 16-4-2 home record and a solid +24 team goal differential. They score goals pretty comparably to Detroit so far but have allowed 51 fewer to this point. A big part of this difference is that their PP is better than 25% and their PK is also top ten in the league.
Detroit’s coming off a loss in Minnesota that was at least a more fun collapse. Gustav Lindstrom is going to miss his chance to start the first goal scoring streak of his career due to injury, but Filip Hronek is back out of protocol. Vlad Namestnikov remains questionable, but Blashill at least said “possible” in practice yesterday.