Rangers view losing skid as necessary part of season: ‘Not the worst thing’

WASHINGTON — The Rangers hope they will be a better team for having experienced this rough patch, over which the club has gone 1-3-1 in their last five games while getting outscored 22-13.

Gearing up for a matinee home-and-home series against the Capitals this weekend, the Blueshirts are trying to see the positives in their longest losing streak of the season and refraining from hitting the panic button.

Sitting in first place in the Metropolitan Division certainly helps, but head coach Peter Laviolette and his team see this stretch as not only something they can learn from but also a necessary hardship for the club to work through on their pursuit of the Stanley Cup.

“I think it’s always good for a team to face some adversity,” Laviolette said after the Rangers suffered their 14th loss of the season, a 5-2 defeat at the hands of the Blues. “Mika [Zibanejad] going out and different things that happen. It’s not always going your way. I think that’s not a bad thing for a team to go through, to have to fight to figure it out, to work to get things back on track.

“There’s some positive. There’s certainly a lot of positive things [Thursday night] from our guys. They fought the entire night to win. There’s things that we’ll continue to work on, but a little adversity in the middle of the year, that’s not the worst thing.”

The long-term losses of Filip Chytil and Kaapo Kakko are finally starting to catch up with the Rangers, who currently have two AHL call-ups in the lineup in Jonny Brodzinski and Jake Leschyshyn.

Tyler Pitlick is also week-to-week with a lower-body injury, which has forced the club to dip deep into its depth pool.

At full strength earlier this season, the Rangers were defensively sound.

They were menaces in the neutral zone, turning strong defense into offense and causing turnovers in all areas of the ice.

In the last month or so, however, the Rangers have struggled to defend opponent’s transition game.

Their neutral zone play hasn’t been nearly as effective as it once was, and the opposition are the ones causing the Rangers to turn the puck over and making them pay for it.

Kakko, in particular, is one of the more defensively responsible forwards on the team.

His absence has been felt, especially in the bottom six.

“I think we’re giving up a little bit too much quality,” Rangers captain Jacob Trouba said Thursday night. “We’re also getting a lot of good chances and [Chris Kreider] hitting two posts on the power play. There’s a lot of moments that we had great looks, [Alexis Lafreniere’s] early. It’s just not going in right now for us. Some of them are going in for them.

“No one’s feeling bad for ourselves. It’s hockey, those things happen. You’re going to go through that throughout the course of a season. It’s a long year and I think you kind of learn a little bit about your teammates, the group, the kind of team we are, when you go through things like this.

“Not that it’s a good thing, but you want to deal with some adversity and figure out who we are and how we’re going to get through it.”

Injuries are a part of every team’s season.

It’s how teams manage to stay afloat, until reinforcements come, that counts.

This is when team belief comes into effect, and the Rangers certainly have faith.

“It’s very high,” Vincent Trocheck said of his confidence in the Rangers’ ability to get back on track. “I know what this team is capable of. We’ve seen it, we’ve proven to ourselves what we’re capable of game in and game out. It’s just some adversity that we’re going to have to get through and hopefully this is something we look back on saying this was a positive.”