The words were spoken by the Rangers’ Vitali Kravtsov but, honestly, they could have come from any player, at any time, who was playing reasonably well, but not scoring.
“I don’t worry about goals or points,” Kravtsov told The Post a couple of weeks ago while he was in the midst of a run on the second line with Artemi Panarin and Vincent Trocheck. “I think I’m getting chances, so I don’t think about that.”
That unit has since been disbanded. Panarin was up with Mika Zibanejad for the second straight game on Friday at the Garden against the Golden Knights. Trocheck was on the third line, between Chris Kreider and Barclay Goodrow.
And Kravtsov, off a run of 17 straight games in the lineup through which he recorded two goals and two assists, was scratched for the second straight game in conjunction with this latest personnel reconstruction.
In advance of his scratch Wednesday at Toronto, head coach Gerard Gallant touched on that decision. Interestingly, goal-scoring, or the lack thereof, came up.
“There’s not a lot of room for some of the kids, sometimes,” Gallant said of the 23-year-old Kravtsov. “He’s played, he’s worked hard, he’s taken a step for us.
“I like the kid. He’s done a good job. But score 15 goals when you’re in for [17] games.”
The point was exaggerated, but you get the drift. At some point, and if you are considered an offense-minded player with an assignment in the top six, it becomes about production.
And production becomes a function of shooting the puck.
The Rangers for years have been notorious for eschewing meat-and-potatoes, straight-line, drive-to-the-net hockey in the offensive zone. Maybe it started with Mats Zuccarello and Derick Brassard looking to make sweet music by going east-west rather than taking the most direct route. That approach became contagious through a team whose analytics were horrendous because of it.
The Blueshirts sometimes operated as if they thought degree of difficulty or degree of creativity would make a goal count twice. David Quinn could be heard mumbling, “east-west, east-west,” out of the door when he was relieved of his duties as coach after three seasons of finesse hockey in the offensive zone that drove him batty.
A year ago, the Rangers ranked next-to-last in the league with 49.33 attempts per 60:00 at five-on-five. They were 30th with 27.34 shots per 60:00. Over the three years prior to that, the team ranked 27th in attempts per 60:00 and 25th in shots per 60:00.
Now, through 48 games, the Blueshirts are 14th with 57.46 attempts per 60:00 and 17th with 30.46 shots per 60:00.
The mentality has changed enough for Gallant to make note of it in the context of discussing Filip Chytil’s increased productivity. But not quite enough to prevent the coach from observing that the club still has a way to go in that direction.
“Fil still wants to pass the puck but definitely the last number of games this season he’s starting to shoot a lot,” Gallant said of Chytil, who had scored seven goals in his past 10 games on 29 shots off 45 attempts entering play Friday. “But he’s getting success, the puck is going in the net and when that happens, you feel pretty comfortable about shooting pucks.”
The message relayed to the team on a consistent basis is the one that Bill Chadwick repeatedly delivered to Barry Beck, though indirectly from the television booth when The Big Whistle teamed with Jim (Chim) Gordon: “Shoot the puck, Barry.”
“We talk about it every day,” Gallant said. “I mean, every day at practice the coaches are saying, ‘Shoot the puck.’ I mean, two-on-ones, you see them out there fooling around, Vinny Trocheck putting it through his legs and going back-and-forth, Bread [Panarin] coming in.
“You know, we want them to do that sometimes in practice but there’s also a good habit in shooting pucks. So some days I get ticked off out there with them, ‘Let’s start shooting some more pucks. It’s simple but, you know, if you don’t shoot the puck it doesn’t go in the back of the net.”
And if you’re a young, top-six type player attempting to make his mark, it eventually does kind of matter if you’re putting the puck in the back of the net.