NHL Playoffs 2012: Was the NY Rangers' Season a Failure Without a Cup Final?

When the 2011-12 NHL season began, not many could have expected the New York Rangers to finish as high as they did or keep playing as long as they did.

Then, when the 2012 Stanley Cup playoffs began, not many could have expected the New York Rangers to go down as early as they did.

So, which of those two sentences wins the titanic battle to define this season?

If one wants to be reasonable, it will have to be the former.

In a span of two years, the Rangers went from barely missing the playoffs on the final day of the regular season and squeezing into eighth place in the Eastern Conference to soaring to the summit of the conference.

Backed by a Vezina Trophy nominee in Henrik Lundqvist and buying into a gutsy, gritty system implemented by Jack Adams Award nominee John Tortorella, this year’s Rangers improved by 16 points in the standings. They finished third in the league in team defense with 2.22 goals against per game and placed eleventh overall on offense with 2.71 goals for per night.

With that, their postseason expectations evolved on the fly. But when the second week of April rolled around, they did too little to support their goaltender.

By the time New Jersey Devils rookie Adam Henrique inserted an overtime goal Friday night to clinch the Eastern Conference for his team, Lundqvist had been forced to play a league-leading 20 games and 1,250 minutes in the playoffs. Those minutes were actually closer to the equivalent of 21 games, the maximum limit for the three rounds New York took part in.

For his part, Lundqvist posted a 1.82 goals-against average and .931 save percentage while the team finished the playoffs with a 2.05 GAA, once again making New York the NHL’s third-best defensive squad.

But after posting two 3-0 shutouts in the first three games of the conference finals, Lundqvist was hardly the same stopper in the three consecutive losses that brought on the Rangers’ downfall. He allowed 10 goals on 64 shots for a 3.35 GAA and .844 save percentage.

Lundqvist’s letdown was primarily owed to the fact that his teammates could only lend him a nightly average of 2.15 goals in the playoffs, making them the ninth-best strike force out of 16 teams.

The shallow offense contributed directly to back-to-back seven-game bouts with the eighth-seeded Ottawa Senators and seventh-seeded Washington Capitals. The second round featured a triple-overtime tilt at Washington’s Verizon Center and saw the contesting teams trade victories every other night.

The unequaled wear-and-tear did not seem so problematic in the first half of the conference finals, when the Rangers survived a deadlock after 40 minutes each game and outscored New Jersey, 8-3.

But when the Devils usurped control this week, Tortorella could not evoke nearly the same resiliency that helped New York surmount a 3-2 series deficit against Ottawa. The Rangers could not build upon their 19-7-4 regular season record and 6-1 playoff record when coming off a loss.

A little more production from the likes of Artem Anisimov, Carl Hagelin and Derek Stepan might have prevented so many losses in the first place. Maybe then, the Rangers, and most importantly Lundqvist, would not have been so taxed in the latter phases of the New Jersey series.

Maybe then they would have had a Game 7 lined up Sunday at Madison Square Garden or Game 1 against Los Angeles lined up for Wednesday.

With budding power forward Chris Kreider added to a relatively young offense and an entire defensive corps still below the age of 30, the Rangers ought to have every opportunity to build upon a revolutionary 2011-12 campaign.

If “failure” is to be applied anywhere, it is in the sense that New York’s offense failed its backstopping backbone by failing to drive home the dagger on opposing goalies early enough in the first two rounds.

But just consider where they were at this time in 2011, 2010, 2009 and really every year since 1997. The fact that the Rangers merely have the opportunity to regret and assess what brought on a third-round shortcoming speaks just as much to progress as it does to patchiness.