Rangers cruise past Connor McDavid-less Oilers for shutout win

EDMONTON, Alberta — The Oilers have face planted out of the gate of the 2023-24 season, and the Rangers just stepped right over them.

Skating without Connor McDavid for the second straight game because of the star center’s upper-body injury, Edmonton has looked like a shell of itself through its first seven contests, and the Rangers took full advantage in a 3-0 win Thursday night at Rogers Place.

As much as the Oilers’ self-inflicted mistakes and discombobulated stretches had a role in the game’s outcome, the Rangers put forth the kind of performance that wins games no matter who the opponent at the other end of the ice is.

They dictated the pace in all three zones.

Forwards and defensemen alike were aggressive on offense.

And backup goalie Jonathan Quick was impenetrable in a 29-save performance for his first shutout in a Rangers uniform.

“I thought it was a good effort, much better effort from start to finish,” head coach Peter Laviolette said after the Rangers improved to 5-2-0 on the season. “A lot of guys played really well. Goaltending, Jonathan played really well. … I think it was just good to come back and play a game that we were happier with the way we played.”

The Rangers got offense from up and down the lineup, as well as the power play, which has now scored in all but one of their first seven games this season.

There wasn’t a whole lot of action in a scoreless opening frame.

The Rangers didn’t give the Oilers much space to work with then, and that continued for a majority of the night.

What they did give up, Quick took care of in his second start with the Rangers.

The Rangers frustrated the Oilers, and Oilers frustrated the fans in attendance clad in orange, white and navy — so much so that the team was booed off its home ice at the end of the second and third periods.

“We’ve been doing a good job of clogging up that neutral zone,” Vincent Trocheck said. “They’re a really good transition team, really good on the rush, so to shut them down in that area of the game was huge for us.”

It was a bullet one-timer off the stick of Adam Fox during the power play that got the Rangers on the board in the second period.

The top man-advantage unit is back to their automatic ways, holding the offensive zone with ease and working it around until the perfect scoring chance is unveiled.

The goal counted as Fox’s sixth point on the power play this season, which is tied with the Red Wings’ Shayne Gostisbehere for the NHL lead.

The Rangers, whose defensive stick work gave the Oilers fits all night, applied the heaps of pressure in the offensive zone that Laviolette called for before the game.

That led to Braden Schneider’s first goal of the season, and the eighth of his career, after the young defenseman wired one past Oilers goalie Stuart Skinner from the high slot for the 2-0 lead in the middle frame.

There has been a lot to like about the Rangers’ second line, which features Artemi Panarin, Filip Chytil and Alexis Lafreniere.

They have not only consistently driven the play this season, but their creativity with the puck has proven to be so difficult to defend.

Lafreniere, off to one of the strongest starts of his Rangers tenure, extended his scoring streak to three games with a quick one-timer to cap the team’s three-goal period.

It’s the first time Lafreniere has scored three games in a row in his career. This season could be the season of a lot of firsts for the 2020 top-overall pick.

“When they’re moving, they’re really dangerous,” Laviolette said. “I think they read off of each other well. I think there’s a good mix of different types of players in there. They were on point tonight.”

The Rangers, now 3-0 on this west coast road trip, weren’t happy with their overall performance in their 3-1 win in Calgary on Tuesday.

That’s just a testament to the high expectation this team has for itself.

The fact is, the Rangers have held opponents to one or zero goals in all five of their wins so far this season. Struggling adversary or not, that statistic says something about them.