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Are the New York Rangers for Real This Time?

Imagine going to see the latest Vince Vaughn movie only to leave the theater weeping after he steals the thing from Meryl Streep and Daniel Day-Lewis. That's the 2016-17 Rangers.
Photo by Adam Hunger-USA TODAY Sports

The 2016-17 New York Rangers don't make a lick of sense. They were never expected to be bad, but nobody predicted they'd be scoring video-game goals on a nightly basis against the league's best teams. Imagine going to see the latest Vince Vaughn movie only to leave the theater weeping after he steals the thing from Meryl Streep and Daniel Day-Lewis. That's the 2016-17 Rangers.

The Rangers are 8-3-0 and have scored 45 goals. Adjusting for inflation, this is like the 1985-86 Edmonton Oilers scoring 130 goals per game. Watching the Rangers drop six goals on the Tampa Bay Lightning, then five goals on the St. Louis Blues, and then five more goals on the Edmonton Oilers in succession shouldn't be jaw-dropping, but in the context of the modern, "first team to three goals wins" NHL, it's nuts.

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Maybe this sounds familiar because the Rangers did this last season. They were 7-2-2 through 11 games and reached a high point of 16-3-2 in mid-November, but it was mostly a magic trick. They were consistently out-everythinged by opponents but found ways to win thanks to scoring on an insanely high rate of their quality chances and a force field in net named Henrik Lundqvist.

It was all smoke and mirrors and a 30-24-7 mark the rest of the season proved it. Ask anyone. Ask Rangers defenseman Marc Staal. He gets it. He was there.

"Last year, Hank stole a bunch of games," he said after Thursday night's game against the Oilers. "We were opportunistic when we got our chances. We knew it at the time, but we kept winning so we just kept going. It's hard to change when you're winning games like that. This time around, we're much better in our own zone. We're not giving up nearly as many chances in the middle of the ice. Our effort and our attention to detail are better.

"We're just—we're just playing better."

Goals on goals on goals. Photo by Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

The word bandied about most often in hockey these days is "sustainable." Is the Rangers' success sustainable? All the underlying numbers last season said that New York could not keep up their early-season success and those numbers are almost always right. The Rangers at five-on-five were beaten like a drum at a Gloria Estefan concert, so seeing them collapse shouldn't have surprised anyone who had been paying attention.

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Is it different this year? Yes. No. Mostly. The Rangers are weird, man.

Let's get the obvious out of the way: the Rangers will not score an average of 4.09 goals per game for 82 games. It's been 20 years since a team cracked the four-goal mark for a season and it's not happening now. This concludes the very obvious portion of this content.

The Rangers' score-adjusted Fenwick through 11 games is 53.4 with a PDO of 104.0; through the same time period last year, it was 49.7 with a PDO of about 106.0. Last year's Rangers won at the blackjack tables for two straight hours hitting on 18 only to lose it all back with the same strategy. This year's team is again winning more hands than it should, but this time it's doing so with a sound strategy, so the correction won't be as severe.

Maybe the power play is making a huge difference? The Rangers are ranked 13th at 21.9 percent, which is good but not exactly winning games on its own. It's only about three points higher than what it was last season, so maybe this is another sign the Rangers are much closer to the real thing than a mirage.

GM Jeff Gorton gave his depth forwards a makeover over the summer and many are playing out of their minds.

Jimmy Vesey is a driving force after Turtle from Entourage helped the rookie decide to sign in New York as a free agent. The 23-year-old has six goals in 11 games and has been a force at even strength; Michael Grabner has six goals after scoring nine last season; Mika Zibanejad has nine points and Brandon Pirri has four goals and seven points.

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If you want to find the number that shows the Rangers aren't scoring 350 goals this season, it's the shooting percentages of Vesey (30.0), Pirri (28.6), Grabner (27.3), and Mats Zuccarello (21.7). When your shooting percentages resemble those of mediocre three-point shooters in the NBA, regression is inevitable.

As a group, the Rangers have scored on 11.6 percent of their five-on-five shots, which also says a correction is coming: the Rangers have shot right around nine percent the past two seasons. That said, since they jettisoned the useless Tanner Glass and the useful but defense-first Dominic Moore, why can't they settle in that ten percent range?

The reason why the offense will come down isn't one glaring thing like a 110 PDO or a gigantic shooting percentage; it's all the little signs of overachieving. The guys carrying the offense are playing far enough above their heads; the five-on-five shooting percentage is a touch too high and even the PDO says to expect a slight downturn.

And then there's this guy. Photo by Adam Hunger-USA TODAY Sports

So there you have it. A comeuppance is on the horizon. The high-flying Rangers and all their pretty goals will dry up and—oh, what's that? The goaltender?

Oh god, the Rangers are going to finish with 120 points, aren't they?

Yes, the offense is bonkers and will stumble like an over-served dad on a hot day at Epcot Center, but the most glaring way the 2016-17 Rangers are nothing like the 2015-16 Rangers is the goaltending. It's not carrying the team every night. It's not an anchor around the feet of the scorers; right now, it's more like a freeloading college dropout sleeping on a cot while mom and dad stock the fridge with food.

Lundqvist and backup goaltender Antti Raanta combined for a .947 save percentage through 11 games last season; this season they have posted a .915 save percentage, which is right around the league average. Lundqvist and Raanta are about 11 points below where they finished last season at five-on-five save percentage.

So if you accept that the Rangers' offense will fade but the goaltending has room to climb to its usual numbers, then maybe the Rangers make all the sense in the world after all.

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