Blogs – Page 108 – Keefe To The City

Aug 7, 2020

Yankees Thoughts: Aaron Boone Worse Than Ever with Extra Rest for Everyday Players

The Yankees have played 12 games in nearly 10 months, but Aaron Boone keeps giving his everyday players days off.

The Yankees’ winning streak ended at seven games thanks to J.A. Happ, and the Yankees only won two of their four games against the Phillies thanks to Aaron Boone. Now the Yankees head to Tampa for their biggest series of the season to date against their only true competition for the division.

Last season, I wrote the Off Day Dreaming blogs on every off day, but this season there aren’t many off days. There aren’t many games. So instead, I have decided to use the Off Day Dreaming format following each series. Yankees Thoughts will be posted after each series this season.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. It didn’t surprise me when DJ LeMahieu and Aaron Judge weren’t in the lineup on Thursday against the Phillies. That’s because nothing surprises me when it comes to Aaron Boone anymore. Truly nothing. These lines from Stanley Hudson in The Office do a good job of explaining it:

Every day you do something stupider than the day before. And I think, “There’s no possible way he can top that.” But what do you do? You find a way, damnit, to top it! You are a professional idiot!

One day Boone will elect to have David Hale close out a game rather than Zack Britton. Then the next day he’ll allow J.A. Happ to remain in a game for much longer than he should and relieve Happ with low-end relievers to put a seven-inning game out of reach. Then the next day he’ll sit his 1- and 2-hitters in the same game, only to eventually use them as pinch hitters anyway. The only days off from Boone’s idiotic decisions are the days the Yankees don’t play. I wrote back on Jan. 3 that my New Year’s Resolution would be to not get upset with Boone this season, but it only took a few games for me to break that promise and I don’t think I will ever be able to go more than three days without vehemently disagreeing with a decision of his.

2. How absurd was it that Boone needed to give LeMahieu and Judge the day off on Thursday? Consider this:

Oct. 19: ALCS Game 6
Oct. 20 to Feb. 11: Off
Feb. 12 to Mar. 12: Spring training
Mar. 13 to June 30: Off
July 1 to July 20: Summer Camp
July 21: Off
July 22: Off
July 23: at Washington (six innings)
July 24: Off
July 25: at Washington
July 26: at Washington
July 27: Off
July 28: Off
July 29: at Baltimore
July 30: at Baltimore
July 31: vs. Boston
Aug. 1: vs. Boston
Aug. 2: vs. Boston
Aug. 3: vs. Philadelphia
Aug. 4: Off
Aug 5: at Philadelphia (double header of two seven-inning games)
Aug 6: at Philadelphia

How much time off do the Yankees need?

3. You want to give players half a game off on the day of a doubleheader? Fine. Given all the time off I just listed (the Yankees have played 12 games in nearly 10 months) and the fact the doubleheader consisted of two seven-inning games, no regular player needed either game off, but OK, you tried to give everyone a game off. To then follow it up the next day saying you’re “trying to pick strategic days off” for LeMahieu and Judge and your strategy is to give them the same day off? What? What are we even doing here? The Yankees are managing this season as if it’s a 162-game season over six months. I get that the Yankees are a lock for the postseason with the expanded field of eight teams per league, but maybe try to finish with the best record in the American League and in baseball for once? Try to play the most amount of games possible at Yankee Stadium in October. Try to do everything you can to put the team in the best possible position to win the World Series for the first time in more than a decade.

4. Essentially, Boone threw away two of the three games in Philadelphia. He threw away the first game of the doubleheader by letting Happ face the lineup a second time in a seven-inning game and then letting his low-end relievers put the game out of reach, and then he threw away Thursday’s game by not playing LeMahieu and Judge in a game the Yankees would lose by one run. You think six, seven or eight more at-bats from LeMahieu and Judge wouldn’t have resulted in the run that was the difference? I can accept losing when the offense gets shut down or when the pitching just doesn’t have it. Only once this season have the Yankees really lost a game they had no chance of winning and that was the second game of the season against the Nationals. Their other two lossers were winnable games. This weekend the Yankees have four games in three days against the Rays, their only competition to win the AL East. One of the days there’s a doubleheader, so two seven-inning games. If Boone wants to prove things are different, play the everyday lineup in each of the four games against the Rays, create real separation in the division and then give guys days off. Boone is managing his lineup like the Yankees have already wrapped things up because they’re 9-3 when they haven’t won a single thing, at 9-3, they don’t have the best record in the AL or in baseball, and yet, they are handing out days off to guys that have essentially been off since October. The Yankees haven’t won anything with Boone managing and they haven’t won anything with the load management strategy the team lives by.

5. LeMahieu is so good. I have been calling him D(erek) J(eter) LeMahieu since last season because of his ability to hit in the cluch and to consistently produce base hits to right field. He was the Yankees’ best overall player in 2019 and if not for Judge carrying the team to wins for a week straight this season, LeMahieu would have to be considered their best player again. After his pinch-hit single in the ninth last night (good thing he didn’t play the whole game), he’s now hitting .429 with a 1.037 OPS. If he were to go 0-for-20 starting on Friday night, he would still be hitting .290. That’s how good he has been. There’s no other hitter I want up in a big spot and there’s no other player on the field I want the ball hit to. I love LeMahieu.

6. The Yankees have a starting pitching problem. Outside of Gerrit Cole’s three starts, they haven’t received at least six innings from any other starter. Only once in the nine non-Cole games did the Yankees’ starter even get to the sixth inning (Jordan Montgomery’s first start). Despite this, the Yankees have won 9 of 12 because their bullpen has been so good, and because Judge hit late-game, go-ahead home runs for nearly a week straight, but it can’t continue. It’s a recipe for disaster to ask you bullpen to get about 15 outs per night. The Yankees purposely tried to use this strategy in the postseason and look where it got them. It got them a six-game loss to the Astros and Zack Britton speaking out about how tired and overworked the bullpen was in the ALCS. To this point, Chad Green, Adam Ottavino and Britton have barely worked, but even the lesser relievers like Luis Avilan, Jonathan Holder and David Hale will begin to get run down, and with how much Boone loves to go to the lesser arms, it won’t end well if they are fatigued.

7. The starting pitching has to be better. If the Yankees’ only consistent starter is Cole this season then they might as well pack up the bats and balls now and try again in 2021 when Luis Severino is back and maybe the team is ready to give Deivi Garcia and Clarke Schmidt a chance. There’s no way the Yankees can get through the postseason with an additional best-of-3 round with only Cole and a bunch of three- and four-inning starts from their relievers. I do believe Masahiro Tanaka will be fine once his pitch count is back to normal and he’s allowed to go a normal length in a game, but even still, that’s only two starters. Montgomery needs to be better than he was on Thursday because Happ and James Paxton seem like lost causes.

8. There’s nothing left to say about Happ that I didn’t write on Thursday or that I didn’t talk about on Thursday’s podcast. He can’t get another start. The Yankees have options like Garcia and Schmidt at the alternate site in Scranton in the event of underperformance or injury on the roster. Well, here is as good of an example of underperformance as you might ever see. Happ hasn’t been good since the start of 2019, and he’s not going to magically return to the pitcher he was in 2018 between now and the end of September. Even if Happ did miraculously turn into that guy, would you feel confident giving him the ball for a postseason start? The Yankees need to give someone else a chance to join the rotation in Happ’s spot, and they needed to be given that chance the next time Happ is scheduled to pitch. The Yankees are long past the point of giving Happ opportunities to turn it around.

9. Welcome back, Gary Sanchez! After taking a fastball in the left arm on Wednesday with noticeably left the seams indented on his skin, Sanchez was back in the lineup on Thursday and hit a two-run, opposite-field home run to finally look like the Sanchez we have all come to know since historically beginning his career in 2016. Sanchez would fly out in his next at-bat, though it was a much better at-bat than we have seen from him over the first two weeks of the season, so maybe that home run will spark his turnaround. I have never stopped believing in Sanchez and as the President of the Gary Sanchez Fan Club, I won’t stop believing in him. I might be the only member left in the club, but membership is going to start increase now.

10. What’s going on with Gleyber Torres? The Yankees’ shortstop had another 0-for-4 game on Thursday night and is now batting .132 with one home run and two RBIs on the season. (For as bad as Sanchez has been, he has as many home runs and one more RBI than Torres.) I guess the good news is the Yankees are 9-3 even though Torres and Sanchez have been automatic outs, Aaron Hicks is batting .207 and Brett Gardner has six hits (three of them just happen to be home runs). The Yankees have been scoring runs and winning because of LeMahieu and Judge, which is why it’s even more ridiculous they were both out of the lineup in the same game last night. But if the Yankees can win 75 percent of their games with two outs in their lineup, they will be OK. OK for the regular season that is. The offense can’t collectively slump (minus LeMahieu) in the postseason again.

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My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!

Blogs • Yankees

Aug 6, 2020

J.A. Happ Can’t Start Another Game for Yankees

I can’t watch J.A. Happ start another game for the Yankees. I just can’t. If it weren’t for money owed, Happ would have stopped starting games for the Yankees a long time ago.

I can’t watch J.A. Happ start another game for the Yankees. I just can’t. If it weren’t for money owed, Happ would have stopped starting games for the Yankees a long time ago. But unfortunately, money owed and not ability or performance decides rotation spots for the Yankees, and because of it, Happ will likely continue to start for the Yankees.

It’s been one year, two months and 16 days since I wrote Yankees Have a J.A. Happ Problem, and yet, he’s still losing games for them. It’s not his fault that he’s losing games for the Yankees though. He didn’t miss out on Patrick Corbin over a measly extra year only to then turn around and give himself a multi-year contract at the age of 36 as a fastball pitcher with a declining fastball. He doesn’t keep himself in the rotation and he doesn’t let himself remain in games as he keeps putting runners on base and letting those runners score. Happ sucks, but he’s going to pitch as long as the Yankees let him, and they keep letting him.

I remember where I was when Happ’s career ended because I sitting directly behind him in center field. That was in the first inning of Game 1 of the 2018 ALDS when J.D. Martinez hit a three-run home run over the Green Monster, ending the game minutes after it had started. Happ has never been the same since. Last season, he was allowed to make 30 starts despite having a 5.01 ERA. Out of the 30, only eight were quality starts and he only managed to go at least six innings in 22 of them. This season has been a continuation of last as Happ has now made two starts for a combined total of seven innings, while pitching to this line: 7 IP, 7 H, 8 R, 8 ER, 8 BB, 3 K, 3 HR, 10.29 ERA, 2.143 WHIP. Clarke Schmidt and Deivi Garcia are wasting pitches in fake games in Scranton as Happ continues to get the ball every fifth day.

Happ brings no value to the team right now. He’s not eating innings, he’s not keeping the team in games and he’s not working toward anything like a postseason start. Rather than accept that the money owed to Happ is a sunk cost and move on and give his rotation spot to someone with the ability to get major league hitters out, it won’t surprise me when Happ is given the ball again for his next scheduled start. And it won’t surprise me when Aaron Boone lets Happ try to figure it out on the mound even though there’s nothing to figure out. Happ can either nibble around the corners and hope to make the perfect pitch each time he releases the ball, which will in turn lead to 10.29 walks-per-nine total he has posted this season, or he can throw the ball in the strike zone and give up extra-base hits on his diminished stuff.

Happ isn’t going to magically find “it” again because there’s nothing left to find. This isn’t a two-start sample size, it’s a going-back-to-the-start-of-last-season sample size. He got knocked around by a bad Orioles lineup and embarrassed by a Phillies lineup that had played one game in 10 days. The details of Happ’s 2021 vesting option with the Yankees are either unknown or undetermined, but the one thing that’s known is the details of it will be based around starts and/or innings pitched in 2020. Happ doesn’t deserve to be in the rotation now and the decision to remove would make the Yankees better both this season and next.

When I wrote Yankees Have a J.A. Happ Problem, it was right after Happ had once again been rocked by an eventual 108-loss Orioles team. After that game, Happ said, “Tonight was just a tough one and I don’t know that I have an answer for it. They hit the bad pitches, they hit the good pitches, and I just got beat tonight. My plan is to get better and figure it out.” That was one year, two months and 16 days ago. He hasn’t gotten better and he hasn’t figured it out. He’s not going to get better and he’s not going to figure it out.

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My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!

Aug 4, 2020

Rangers-Hurricanes Game 2 Thoughts: The Brink of Elimination

After waiting for Rangers hockey for more than four months, it might leave as quickly as it returned. For the second straight game, the Rangers were thoroughly outplayed by the Hurricanes and now the Rangers will play for their season on Tuesday night.

That didn’t take long. After waiting for Rangers hockey for more than four months, it might leave as quickly as it returned. For the second straight game, the Rangers were thoroughly outplayed by the Hurricanes and now the Rangers will play for their season on Tuesday night.

The Rangers were able to keep the Hurricanes off the board for a little longer in Game 2, this time for four minutes and 32 seconds before Andrei Svechnikov scored his first of three goals for his first career hattrick. Artemi Panarin tied the game at 1 a little more than seven minutes later on a 5-on-3 (if the Rangers didn’t score on a 5-on-3 I might have lost my TV), but that was it for the Rangers’ scoring for the afternoon.

Two minutes and 22 seconds in the second, the Hurricanes had a 3-1 lead and the two-goal deficit seemed more like seven goals. The Rangers’ lack of possession kept them from creating quality scoring chances and when they did get a decent shot on Petr Mrazek, it was Brett Howden or Brendan Smith taking the shot. Somehow, the Rangers have made Mrazek look how Henrik Lundqvist looked at Mrazek’s age.

Lundqvist was good once again. Four goals against might have you thinking differently if you missed the matinee, but the same old adage held true in the Lundqvist era: it could have been a lot worse. The only goal of the four Lundqvist had a chance on was Svechnikov’s first, which found its way through Lundqvist’s right arm. The other three weren’t getting stopped by Lundqvist or Igor Shesterkin or anyone.

Lundqvist should be in the net again in Game 3. Even if you discount what he’s done for the last 15 years (which David Quinn likes to do), he’s earned it with his play in this series. It would be risky to turn to Shesterkin now when he’s been in street clothes for both games and hasn’t seen game action since March. If Game 3 is Lundqvist’s last game as a Ranger or if Game 2 was, it would be fitting for him to go out the way every Rangers team he’s been a part of has gone out: with him trying to single-handedly carry the team to victory.

The Rangers’ winning history over the Hurricanes and Lundqvist’s winning history over the Hurricanes will come to an end unless the Rangers are able to win three straight, and they are capable of winning three straight against this Hurricanes team. During the regular season, they won three straight against much better competition, but it might be too late for the Rangers to find their January, February and March play that got them into this qualifying round.

The undefeated 4-0 mark against the Hurricanes this season was a facade. In those four games, the Rangers were outplayed like they’ve been outplayed in Games 1 and 2, outshot 161-104 by the Hurricanes in the regular season and had a worse expected goals total in three of the four games. The Rangers didn’t deserve to win two of those games, let alone four, and they haven’t deserved to win either of these two qualifying games, scoring just three goals in six periods.

In Game 2, Quinn lacked the urgency he has lacked all season, waiting too long to pair Panarin with Mika Zibanejad, and too long to put out forward combinations to give the Rangers the best chance to score. With the defense playing as badly as it has in Games 1 and 2, it would seem ill-advised to wait around for the Rangers to trail in Game 3 before pairing the two stars together. Quinn needs to manage his roster with urgency from the opening shift or it will be the last opening shift the Rangers have this season.

Blogs • Yankees • Yankees Thoughts

Aug 3, 2020

Yankees Thoughts: Aaron Boone’s Bullpen Management Can’t Stop Aaron Judge from Winning Games

The Yankees opened Yankee Stadium in 2020 by sweeping the Red Sox, and it doesn’t get much better than that. Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

The Yankees opened Yankee Stadium in 2020 by sweeping the Red Sox, and it doesn’t get much better than that.

Last season, I wrote the Off Day Dreaming blogs on every off day, but this season there aren’t many off days. There aren’t many games. So instead, I have decided to use the Off Day Dreaming format following each series. Yankees Thoughts will be posted after each series this season.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. I have long wondered what it would be like to get a full season from a healthy Aaron Judge. We almost got it in 2017 when he led the league in home runs, won Rookie of the Year and finished second for MVP, but a nagging second-half shoulder injury kept him from having an even better season that year. This year, Judge would have missed the entire first half of the season with the broken rib/collapsed lung injury that went undiagnosed from last September and we would have once again been deprived of a full season from him. But in this shortened 60-game season, we are seeing what a healthy Judge can do and that’s hit six home runs and drive in 14 runs through eight games, with all six of those home runs coming in the last five games. Judge has been the best player in baseball for the first week-plus of the season and is certainly the heavy favorite to win MVP right now (unless the season gets canceled, which could happen at any second). Judge powered the Yankees to a ninth-inning comeback win on Thursday, gave the Yankees the lead for good on Friday, gave the Yankees an early lead on Saturday and hit two go-ahead home runs on Sunday. Not even James Paxton’s horrible pitching or Aaron Boone’s nonsensical bullpen management can prevent the Yankees from winning when Judge is hitting like this.

2. The Yankees have a starting pitching problem. You might not think they do since they’re 7-1, but having every starter not named Gerrit Cole fail to go at least six innings is a recipe for disaster that will eventually catch up with the team and burn out the elite relievers the way it did in the postseason last year. No one is worried about Cole, and I’m not worried about Masahiro Tanaka, who was limited in his only start this season by a pitch count. After those two, it’s Jordan Montgomery, who looked good in his lone start, but it’s one start, and then it’s James Paxton whose fastball has disappeared and J.A. Happ who hasn’t been good since the moment before he threw his first pitch in Game 1 of the 2018 ALDS. Paxton was given extra days off following his outing in the second game of the season in D.C. when he recorded three outs and was pulled in the second inning with the bases loaded and no outs, and while he lasted longer in his second start (three innings), he was just as bad. Paxton allowed two runs in the first and three more in the third (only one was earned), finishing with this line: 3 IP, 7 H, 5 R, 3 ER, 0 BB, 4 K, 1 HR. During his in-game interview ESPN, Aaron Boone told the broadcast Paxton “feels really good” despite the results. I feel really good too and also can’t get out major league hitters. Does that mean I can get a start? Paxton’s next scheduled start would come against the Rays next weekend, and I’m sure he’ll make that start, and I’m sure I’ll be writing something to similar to this about him after it.

3. Here was the Yankees’ starting rotation in January:

Gerrit Cole
Luis Severino
James Paxton
Masahiro Tanaka
J.A. Happ

Here was the Yankees’ starting rotation in February:

Gerrit Cole
Luis Severino: Tommy John surgery
James Paxton: back surgery
Masahiro Tanaka
J.A. Happ

Here is the Yankees’ rotation now:

Gerrit Cole
Masahiro Tanaka
Jordan Montgomery
?
?

I put question marks in the fourth and fifth spots because while they technically belong to Paxton and Happ, we are getting closer to both guys losing their spots in the rotation. If those spots were based on performance and not based on money owed they would already be out of the rotation. But the Yankees feel the need to try to find six to seven mph on Paxton’s fastball and try to salvage the sunk cost that Happ is at this point. The expanded postseason field erased any urgency the Yankees might have been managed with this season (though I think they would have been managed the same way if only five teams from the AL were going to the postseason), and it also erased any urgency the Yankees have when it comes to making drastic decisions like taking two veterans out of the rotation.

4. Thankfully, Montgomery looked as good in his season debut as he did in spring training and summer camp. It seems laughable now that it was Montgomery whose first turn through the rotation was skipped so the Yankees could use an opener and let Paxton and Happ pitch as well. If the playoffs started today, Cole gets Game 1, Tanaka gets Game 2 and Montgomery gets Game 3. I don’t even know that Paxton or Happ should be on the postseason roster if the playoff started today since what purpose would they serve? Let a huge lead dwindle? Let a big deficit grow bigger? In actuality, they would both be on the postseason roster considering Happ was on it last year when he was as bad, if not worse, than the duo has been this season. And how did Happ help out of the bullpen in last year’s postseason? By allowing a walk-off home run in Game 2 of the ALCS.

5. Boone needs to get better at managing the bullpen. In his third season as Yankees manager, he’s somehow gotten worse at deciding which relievers to use and when. Last Sunday in D.C., he was saved by the Yankees’ power after questionable bullpen choices. On Thursday in Baltimore, he let Jonathan Loaisiga pitch an unnecessary third inning with his elite relievers completely healthy and got saved by Judge in the ninth. On Saturday, he let David Hale stay in for a two-inning save because Zack Britton had warmed up too much recently, and Hale allowed the tying run to come to the plate in the ninth before getting saved by Andrew Benintendi being completely lost in the box. And on Sunday, he let Michael King pitch a fourth inning with a fully-rested Adam Ottavino, Chad Green and Zack Britton. King allowed a go-ahead home run to Rafael Devers and then Boone removed him from the game for Ottavino. He would rather have Ottavino pitch with the Yankees trailing by a run than in a tie game. Once again, Boone was saved by his offense.

6. The Yankees need two managers the same way some NFL teams have had a kicker for field goals and a kicker for kickoffs. Boone can be the clubhouse manager who keeps the team loose and pals around on road trips and speaks to the media, and then the Yankees can have an in-game manager, who makes every decision from the lineup card until the final out of the game because Boone has proven he can’t handle in-game strategy and he has less than two months to figure it out before his third postseason as manager. This could also go for general manager as well. Brian Cashman can make all the trades since that has been his forte, and another general manager can handle signing free agents, which Cashman has failed at aside from CC Sabathia and Cole, who were the easiest two free agents ever to sign.

7. Aaron Hicks is not a No. 5 hitter. He’s not a leadoff hitter. He’s not a 2-hitter or a 3-hitter or a cleanup hitter. He’s not even a 6-hitter. He’s not a top two-thirds-of-the-lineup hitter. Hicks belongs in the bottom third of the lineup. I don’t care that he’s a switch hitter. I don’t care that he can bat left-handed against right-handed starting pitchers. Hicks is a .241/.341/.432 hitter in a 1,583 plate appearances as a Yankee. He was outstanding for the first three months of 2017 (before getting hurt, of course), and he was very good in the second half of 2018, but that’s been it. He’s been a Yankee since 2016 and has had the equivalent of one full season as someone worthy of being a top two-thirds bat.

8. This is what the Yankees’ lineup should be, no matter which hand the starting pitcher throws with:

DJ LeMahieu, 2B
Aaron Judge, RF
Gleyber Torres, SS
Giancarlo Stanton, DH
Luke Voit, 1B
Gary Sanchez, C
Aaron Hicks, CF
Gio Urshela, 3B
Brett Gardner, LF

The Yankees would never write out that lineup though because they HAVE to separeate the right-handed bats, even if they purposely built a right-handed-heavy lineup, and even if the left-handed bats they would use to separate aren’t that good.

9. With Tommy Kahnle’s season and likely his Yankees tenure over after needing Tommy John surgery, the Yankees have 10 relievers on the roster, and only three “elite” relievers left with Aroldis Chapman still out. The “elite” relievers are Zack Britton, Chad Green and Adam Ottavino, and then there’s everyone else. Here is my bullpen pecking order based on trust and based on one inning:

Zack Britton
Chad Green
Adam Ottavino
Jonathan Loaisiga
Nick Nelson
Michael King
David Hale
Luis Avilan
Jonathan Holder
Brooks Kriske

10. I really like what I saw from Nelson in his major league debut over the weekend. How could you not? Nelson looks like he has the ability to join the elite group at some point and I know it was only one outing and one game, but the stuff and poise are clearly there. He deserves a look in a big spot in the near future, certainly more than Hale or Avilan or Holder.

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My book The Next Yankees Era: My Transition from the Core Four to the Baby Bombers is now available as an ebook!

Blogs • Rangers • Rangers Playoffs

Aug 2, 2020

Rangers-Hurricanes Game 1 Thoughts: Henrik Lundqvist Still Can’t Score in the Postseason

The Rangers lost Game 1 to the Hurricanes after being thoroughly outplayed. Henrik Lundqvist did all he could, but I’m sure to many it wasn’t enough.

You could take Saturday’s Rangers game and insert it into any of the last 15 Rangers seasons and it would fit seamlessly. A Rangers postseason game in which the team is thoroughly dominated, needs Henrik Lundqvist to stand on his head to have a chance and attemps a comeback a little too late? It was a game straight out of the Rangers’ post-lockout era, and unfortunately, it came against a team they have grown accustomed to beating, and a team they should beat.

In the first minute of Game 1 of the Rangers’ Stanley Cup qualifying series against the Hurricanes, Jesper Fast took a big hit from former teammate Brady Skjei. It was a big enough hit that Fast, arguably the Rangers’ best defensive player, was lost on the ice for the remainder of his shift. Most likely concussed from the hit, Fast stayed on the ice long enough to find his way back into the defensive zone where he stayed flat-footed because of his head injury and never thought to watch for or pick up Jacob Slavin joining the forecheck by creating a backdoor lane to the net. A cross-zone pass to Slavin and a perfect shot over Lundqvist’s right shoulder gave the Hurricanes a 1-0 just 61 seconds into the game. Fast never returned.

The game was officiated like a September preseason game in which the league is trying to display how infractions will be called for the upcoming season. And while there hasn’t been hockey in nearly four months and we are much closer to the start of a new season than we normally are to a postseason, calling 16 minor penalities in a playoff game is simply absurd. The entire first two periods were played with special teams and the more penalties the Rangers took, the more Artemi Panarin sat on the bench. And the more he sat on the bench, the more ice time Brett Howden and Greg McKegg received.

Like the regular season, it wasn’t until the Rangers’ chance of winning was approaching impossible that David Quinn began to make line decisions with urgency. It wasn’t until the Rangers trailed by two goals with about two minutes to go in the game that he finally gave in to putting Panarin and Mika Zibanejad on the ice together to kill a penalty and try to create offense. The desperation move from Quinn paid off as the two were able to control the puck in the Hurricanes’ zone and both assist on the Rangers’ second goal from the unlikely stick of Marc Staal.

The Rangers played the way they played for the first half of the regular season, abandoning the style of play that led to them going on the type of run needed to now be part of the 24-team tournament. Their play was chaotic in the first period as they let the Hurricanes dominate possession, and if not for Lundqvist, the game would have been over before the first intermission. Unfortunately, I can see Quinn going to Igor Shesterkin in Game 2 on Sunday, even though Lundqvist earned the right to play and deserves to play the next game after his performance in Game 1. But like the faction of fans who probably think the three goals against were Lundqvist’s fault and he’s the reason the team is already down in the best-of-5 series, Quinn will say the team needs a spark and he’ll go to Shesterkin. It’s illogical and unfair, but it’s the way Quinn makes decisions. The same way he thinks Howden or McKegg are better options than Panarin or Zibanejad at any point in a hockey game.

After going 4-0 against the Hurricanes this season, the Hurricanes finally solved the Rangers. Or at least they finally held on against the Rangers. Game 1 was nearly identical to most of the Rangers-Hurricanes games this season with the Rangers getting thoroughly outplayes. The only difference was the final score. In the regular season, the Rangers were always able to get even better goaltending than they did on Saturday and they were always able to find the net when they needed to. Without Lundqvist somehow playing better than he did, which might not have been humanly possible, and without puck luck, the Rangers experienced the fate they were able to avoid against Carolina earlier this year.

The Rangers need to win Game 2. They don’t have to win Game 2, though if they don’t, their season will be on the brink of elimation. The five-month wait for Rangers hockey can’t only last a few days, but if the Rangers continue to play like they did on Saturday, it will.