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Rangers close regular season with a win, now the offseason work begins...

May 9, 2021, 2:29 PM ET [392 Comments]
Jan Levine
New York Rangers Blogger • RSSArchiveCONTACT
The Rangers closed out the regular season with a 5-4 win over Boston. In a game that mattered little - save for the final standings - New York showed a little heart and guts but winning their first contest in six games. With all that swirled around the organization the past 10 games, pulling up their bootstraps and putting forth a quality effort was a nice way to comclude the year.



If you watched the post-game press conferemce, you can almost see the weight that past week and half has taken on Mika Zibanejad, who tallied twice in the win, the last the 200th of his career. His reaction likely mirrors that of the team, who saw the playoff hopes go out the window after gettong soundly outplayed twice by the Islanders, had the Tom Wilson incident last Monday, the "statement" sent Tuesday, saw President John Davidson and GM Jeff Gorton fired Wednesday, replaced by Chris Drury and responded to clams they were soft by dropping the gloves early and often that night.



The team knew that Zib was close with Alexis Lafreniere, who scored his 12th of the season, grabbing the puck after the goal for Zib. In the win, Keith Kinkaid started, replaced by Igor Sheshterkin. Pavel Buchnevich had a trio of assists, finishing the year with 20 goals and 28 assists for a career-best 48 points in 54 games. Ryan Strome contibuted a pair of helpers to close the season with 14 goals and 35 assists, despite playing a dozen games or so without Artemi Panarin. Vitali Kravtsov contributed his second marker of the season while K'Andre Miller netted his fifth.

Now, we hit the question mark part of the season. In addition, recapping the good, the bad and the ugly, which I will get to later this week. The good should be fairly easy to determine, some of which i covered above. Dtermining the difference between the bad and the ugly is what will be the challenging part. How to delineate one from the other in this wacky season will be like splitting hairs. I throw the challenge to you to provide your good from the year, which can be the obvious and not so obvious, but also, the bad and the ugly.

In addition, we also will have the top-25 questions, several of which will be fairly easy. These will be tackled as the offseason continues. I added three of them below, but again, throw this to you to provide me the ones you have.

1) Will David Quinn be back as the coach?
2) If Quinn is not back, who should take over as coach? Gerard Gallant? Mike Babcock? John Totorella (who won't return to Columbus and was mentioned by Nick Kypreos below)? Rick Tocchet? Kris Knoblauch? Other?



3) With Mika Zibenajed a free agent after next season, would you start contract negotiations now, and if so, what type of deal would you offer in terms of years and dollars?
4) More to come....

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