The Rangers' unofficial new mascot, a green rubber frog, made its timely debut at practice Friday.
The frog was selected mainly because it has two faces -- smiling on one side, frowning on the other. The Rangers' goalies hauled the frog around the rink to express their opinions about each drill and to force their weary teammates to lighten up.
The Rangers, like the frog, have shown two faces all season. On the happy side, they won 44 games and clinched their first playoff berth since 1997. On the opposite side, they have lost eight games in a row and could be swept from the playoffs by Saturday evening.
If the Rangers lose to the Devils in Game 4 today at Madison Square Garden, as much of the hockey world expects, they will probably look back on this season with mixed feelings. No one can deny that they changed the image of the franchise in the past six months. But some may argue that they started to change it back in the past week.
"You can say it was a successful season," center Steve Rucchin said. "But to just get to this point is not satisfactory."
The Rangers did not need to beat the Devils in the first round of the playoffs to declare this season a success. They needed to win a couple of games, however, to provide further proof that their rebuilding effort was working.
Now that they are behind in the series, 3-0, having been outscored by 13-2, they are simply trying to avoid embarrassment and salvage some respect.
"We don't want anyone to look at our regular season as a complete illusion," Rangers coach Tom Renney said. "We've had a good regular season and we want to punctuate it properly."
Renney has repeatedly referred to Game 4 as Judgment Day, an ominous title considering that the Rangers had supposedly passed judgment before the playoffs began. Renney did not say that he would be evaluating individual players in Game 4, but it was clear that the Rangers would take playoff performances into account when forming their strategy for the off-season. Those who do not contribute now may not be back for training camp.
When the Rangers evaluate themselves after the season, they may recognize that they were overachievers who wore themselves out to reach the playoffs and could not possibly have expected to advance far. Participating in the playoffs should give older players the incentive to return and younger players the experience to improve next time around. But such perspective may not come for weeks. Right now, the playoffs trump the regular season in every way, and a couple of missteps in April can obscure any accomplishments from October to March.
"We play to win the Stanley Cup," defenseman Darius Kasparaitis said. "Failure in the playoffs -- I count that as not a good season."
If nothing else, the playoffs have highlighted the Rangers' most obvious problems: They do not take enough shots, they sometimes commit too many penalties and they could use another reliable defenseman.
The Rangers acquired Sandis Ozolinsh to help in that regard, but he has been booed regularly at Madison Square Garden and will probably be benched for Game 4.
The team, however, has more significant decisions to make in the off-season than what do with Ozolinsh. Martin Straka and Martin Rucinsky will be free agents, and it is difficult to assign them a value. They are proven scorers and, like Jaromir Jagr, they are from the Czech Republic.
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