Okay -- sorry for the world's most obvious headline. Last night's game was... interestiung. Frustrating. As you read the following discussions bear the following in mind -- in spite of all of their horrible mistakes, bad penalties and poor personal performances, the Rangers came darn close to getting at least a point out of this game. Another late rally but they had just given too much ground this time around. Anyway, that's why I found it at least interesting.

The Rodent gets us started with assorted interesting observations on last night's game.

In The Post this morning, Larry seems particularly impassioned. One gets the feeling that he either loves this team as much as we do, or has serious money riding on the season. In any event, his heart is on his sleeve as he decries Dunham's inability to get it done, stupid mistakes across the board, awful performances by Malakhov, Purinton and Kovalev, and no accountability being demanded by Sather for their sins.

The Times also tackles the accountability issue. Holik is quoted as saying, "You have to send a message across, no matter who it is." When asked if this meant benching players -- a suggestion Holik made while in Jersey, only to be the first man benched for making mistakes -- he responded, "That's not my advice. That's what happened to me, and it worked. I'll leave it at that."
Sather's response to the suggestion he bench players, as reported in The Daily News and elsewhere: "Either you end up benching three or four guys who we don't have replacements for or you keep talking about it." Yes -- talking about it. Maybe he should give out hugs to players who have bad nights.

Arthur Staples is trying to pay off some holiday bills with three articles in the morning's Newsday. The first article sums up the game pretty well noting that it was poor goaltending and special teams play that let us down last night.

And speaking more on special teams, Staples' second article has some player criticism of Sather's inability to properly prepare the team for the power play. "In all honesty, we've got to practice it," Lindros said, directly challenging Glen Sather's off-the-cuff style. And then this from Kovalev: "We're working on it, but we're working without pressure," Kovalev said. "The five-on-oh drills [with a power-play unit working only against a goaltender, no penalty-killers] is not doing anything. Maybe we're worried about hurting guys [with shots], but five-on-oh, there's not a lot to do."

Finally, Arthur discusses the return of Anson Carter, noting "The Rangers rallied to grab points in all three games that Carter missed, and he had been without a point in the four previous games during this trying season." In other words, Carter is a horrible jinx. It's notable that Hlavac was the odd man out with Carter's return.

The Journal News has all of the same stuff from all of the other papers this morning but features some fun notes. Purinton on whether the team shouldn't just waive him if he won't go to Hartford: "I think you think all different things. It's come up but obviously it's their decision and obviously they want me to stay. We have a good relationship." I.e., he has pictures of Sather making love to a goat. Sather said he played Purinton over Joel Bouchard because Bouchard "seemed to have a few problems in the game the other night (at Los Angeles)." Well -- fortunately Dale is not Joel, eh Glen? And then this is just sad: An industry source said the real reason the local Fox Sports station did not broadcast last night's game was because it didn't want to pay holiday wages to its crew. In the spirit of the holidays, I'd like to wish a slow and unpleasant death to Rupert Murdoch.

Finally, The Star Ledger has the bottom line -- The Rangers took too many penalties. Here's what Messier had to say on the subject: "The whole talk before the game was that we can't take six penalties tonight because we're playing a better team than the last two we faced. We're not going to get away with taking minors against a team like that. And that's exactly what ended up happening. It's disappointing."

The Lowly Penguins will hopefully cheer us all up tomorrow. Drive safe everyone.

-- Rightbug

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