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The Rangers opened the 2023-24 against the Sabres on Thursday night in Buffalo with a dominating 5-1 win in Peter Laviolette’s debut as head coach.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Rangers.

1. What team am I watching? That’s what I asked myself as the final seconds of the season-opening first period wound down in Buffalo.

“This has been a nearly flawless period for the Rangers,” Joe Micheletti said at that moment as if he were reading my mind.

After 20 minutes, the Rangers had a 2-0 lead, had the shot advantage with 12 to just seven, had won 64 percent of the faceoffs, had converted their only power-play opportunity and had thoroughly dominated play. It was hard not to be overly excited and ecstatic about this Rangers team after just one of 246 periods.

2. With the hype and anticipation of a new season, the hiring of a new head coach, the implementation of a new system and 25 percent turnover rate in the opening night lineup, it would have been understandable for the Rangers to struggle out of the gate. Add in opening the season on the road against a tough opponent in the young-and-hungry Sabres team that missed the postseason by a single point, and it would have been painful but acceptable for the Rangers to look flat early on. The opposite happened.

“We were ready to skate, ready to compete,” Peter Laviolette said. “It kind of stayed that way the whole game.”

3. After creating some opportunities within the first two minutes of play, Artemi Panarin drove the net to secure his own rebound on a wrist shot from the slot, and without ever looking to his left, slid the puck meticulously across the crease for Alexis Lafreniere to bang it into an open net for the game’s first goal.

It would be hard to find any Rangers fan who, if given the chance, wouldn’t have picked Lafreniere to score the team’s first goal of the season in the first game of the season, let alone in the first 3:47 of the first game of the season. After the overpublicized frustrating preseason Lafreniere endured and the criticism he drew over the last month, he put it all to rest quickly in the first game that matters, reminding everyone that preseason play is meaningless.

4. It was Lafreniere’s defensive play that sparked a turnover with just under eight minutes in the second that led to a Panarin goal, though somehow Lafreniere wasn’t credited with an assist on the play. The fourth-year, former No. 1 overall pick was outstanding in the season opener and rewarded his new head coach for believing in him, actually coaching him up over the last two weeks and not shying away from keeping in the team’s top six.

“(Lafreniere) took a step from those practices and brought it into the game,” Laviolette said. “I thought the line was excellent.”

5. The Panarin-Filip Chytil-Lafreniere line was wildly impressive. They generated high-quality chances right from their first shift and produced the Rangers’ first and third goals, playing with a level of chemistry as if they have been a line for years. As a line, they outshot the Sabres 8-0 in the first period.

They weren’t the only ones with a big night. Chris Kreider scored his first of the season on a tip-in on the power play that gave the Rangers a 2-0 lead and added a shorthanded goal in the third to extend the Rangers’ lead to 4-1. That shorthanded goal came at the perfect time as it started to feel like the Sabres were about to break through.

6. Down 3-0, the Sabres scored with 1:30 left in the second when a shot blocked by Jacob Trouba unfortunately landed right on the stick of JJ Petrka. With 37 seconds left in the period, the Sabres got their first power play of the game (it would have been their second if not for Jordan Greenway retaliating on Kreider immediately following a boarding call) after a soft interference call on Erik Gustafsson (who made some key defensive plays in his Rangers debut). The Sabres didn’t score on that power play that carried over into third, but at 8:51 of the third, Chytil was called for tripping and less than two minutes later, Trocheck went off tripping as well. The Sabres were getting man advantages left and right, but the Rangers’ penalty kill prevented them from getting on the board.

“The penalty kill was absolutely courageous the way they defended,” Laviolette said, “and the way they blocked shots.”

Seconds after Jeff Skinner clanged a shot off the crossbar that would have made it a one-goal game, Mika Zibanejad recorded his second of three assists on the night on the all-important, game-ending Kreider shorty. With 1:29 left, Jacob Trouba scored a full-ice empty netter, and the Rangers went on to win 5-1.

7. It’s crazy to think I haven’t mentioned Igor Shesterkin yet, given that he turned away 24 of 25 shots faced. Shesterkin wasn’t challenged in the first period, but needed to make some keys saves at the end of the second and moments before Kreider’s shorthanded goal in the third. He came up big when he needed (which he always seems to) and earned his 100th career win in the process. The fact I didn’t mention him in these Thoughts until now is a testament to how great he is in that a one-goal-against performance against the third-highest scoring team from a season ago isn’t unordinary, for as silly as that sounds.

8. I wanted Peter Laviolette to replace Gerard Gallant. I was in the minority of wanting Laviolette’s sixth head coaching job in the league to be with the Rangers, but after more than two decades of watching him succeed everywhere he has been, if the Rangers were going to go with someone with NHL experience, I wanted it to be Laviolette.

This isn’t one-game sample size praise either. I believe in Laviolette and trust him as Rangers coach. You won’t find me jumping off his bandwagon if the Rangers falter or slide. Likely because I don’t think they will do either under him. (Sure, I could do without Vincent Trocheck leading all Rangers forwards in ice time by nearly three minutes, but it’s acceptable after last night’s overall performance.)

9. The differences in just one game between Laviolette’s plan his predecessor were stark. The Rangers forced turnovers and won 1-on-1 battles all over the ice, dominated the neutral zone, and rather than give the first power-play unit the entirety of each man-advantage, the second unit was given ample time to set up and create opportunities. Given the team’s play, preparation, chemistry and game plan, it’s almost as if I was watching a completely different franchise from last season.

10. “It’s one win, Laviolette said, “but it’s a good start.”

Not just a “good start,” a great start. A dominating start. A you-can’t-ask-for-a-better-first-game start. It was the kind of full-game effort we have so infrequently seen from these Rangers. In recent seasons, the first-period effort would have waned in the second and the two-goal lead would have been erased. On Thursday, the effort was maintained and the lead was extended. It was a refreshing and satisfying performance. The kind of performance that not only wins in the regular season, but the kind that wins in April, May and June.

Maybe it was just one of 82 and the Rangers will lay an egg in Columbus on Saturday night. I don’t think it was and I don’t think they will. I think it was a sign that these Rangers have taken the next step with the right head coach behind the bench to guide them.

Vintage Ice Hockey is the only company that sells premium-quality jerseys, apparel and team merchandise for defunct minor league hockey franchises. It’s a family-run, hockey fan-driven company that’s committed to celebrating and preserving the legacies of defunct minor league hockey franchises. Check out their collection spanning over 100 years of minor league hockey and use code KTTC for 15% off your order!

The Rangers showed the sizable gap between a team that’s contending for a championship and a team that seems to have no plan when they wanted to on Wednesday night against the Canucks. In the end, they got the expected two points, but it wasn’t as easy as it probably should have been.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Rangers.

1. There aren’t many games I expect the Rangers to win, but Wednesday night against the Canucks was one of them. The Canucks are a poorly-run organization with a bad on-ice product that just changed head coaches midseason in the oddest way possible and also traded their captain a month before the the trade deadline. They are a mess. They are a team that has Connor Bedard aspirations and the Rangers are a team that has Lord Stanley aspirations, and the disparity was evident when the Rangers wanted it to be on Wednesday.

2. The Rangers scored 6:53 into the game on a beautiful, no-look pass from Vincent Trocheck to Chris Kreider on a 2-on-1. From just inside the blue line until his pass, Trocheck kept his eyes on Spencer Martin, making everyone believe Trocheck would shoot. He didn’t and the Rangers took a 1-0 lead. One minute and 38 seconds later, the Rangers scored again.

Filip Chytil scored his 19th of the season to extend his goal-scoring streak to five straight with his seventh in the last five games. (He now has 11 goals in the last 13 games as well.) It’s easy to forget Chytil is 23 years old because this is his sixth season in the league, having debuted in 2017-18. Chytil is going to get paid if he keeps up this level of play and production (as he should) as a true second center (again, if this is who he truly is). You would like to think the Rangers will be able to find a way to keep him, but unfortunately, the money owed to Trocheck is likely the money needed for Chytil.

After the Chytil goal, Rick Tocchet’s face had an expression equivalent of someone who gave up a nice TV gig to join a disaster. Eight minutes and 31 seconds into the game, and the game was essentially over. Or rather it should have been.

3. In typical Rangers fashion, they didn’t score the next goal, which would have made the remainder of the game a formality. With two minutes and 24 seconds left in the first, Conor Garland scored after the Rangers let Quinn Hughes weave his way around the top of the offensive zone without any pressure. Of course the Canucks were able to get on the board against the Rangers’ fourth line and third defensive pair.

“We were playing real good hockey and then all of a sudden we change our game a little bit and started turning pucks over in the neutral zone and going cross-ice and stuff like that,” Gerard Gallant said. “You get up and think it’s going to be easy and then all of a sudden it’s a hockey game.”

I’m sure Vitali Kravtsov and Julien Gauthier held back a good laugh upstairs, watching the site of Will Cuylle, Sammy Blais and Jake Leschyshyn contributing nothing positive in yet another game. It’s beyond frustrating that Kravtsov and Gauthier, two players who could potentially be difference makers, continue to not play, so that Gallant can get his traditional fourth line, even if that fourth line provides no offensive value and is a defensive liability.

4. In the opening minutes of the second, the Canucks drove the play, and it felt like yet another game in which the Rangers would blow a two-goal lead after growing comfortable with their early success. Thankfully, Alexis Lafreniere changed that at 6:23 in the second when he was able to finish off a Jacob Trouba shot by pushing the puck through the last inches of the crease and into the net. For Lafreniere, it was his second goal in as many games after this overtime winner on Monday, and for the Kid Line, it was their second goal of the game with all three members of it getting on the scoresheet.

5. “They were good again, scored a couple of big goals, tonight, obviously,” Gallant said after the game about the Kid Line. “I don’t think anybody was great defensively tonight, but the Kid Line created chances for us, for sure.”

A nice little backhanded compliment from the coach on the line he never seems to want to compliment from a group of players he never wants to praise. Luckily for him, the two goals they provided were the difference between the Rangers winning by a goal or losing by one, mostly thanks to his personally-constructed fourth line.

6. The Canucks didn’t go away, cutting the lead to a goal again after J.T. Miller found Vasily Podkolzin for his first goal of the year. It’s been five years since the Rangers traded Miller to the Lightning. As a Ranger, Miller produced 0.50 points per game in his age 19 through 24 seasons. With the Lightning, Miller had 0.69 points per game in his age 24 and 25 seasons. As a Canuck, Miller has averaged 1.04 points per game in 253 games over his age 26 through 29 seasons.

7. As a former first-round pick (15th overall in 2011), Miller is as good of cautionary tale as any that being a highly-touted prospect doesn’t translate to success in the NHL right away. Or it’s a cautionary tale that the Rangers have no idea how to develop their own potential high-end talent. The Rangers could use Miller. Every team could use a player of his caliber. Instead, they added him as a sweetener in the Ryan McDonagh package to the Lightning.

8. The same can be said for Pavel Buchnevich, who scored a career-high 30 goals With the Blues last season (in only 73 games) after being traded by the Rangers. Buchnevich has scored 15 goals in 38 games this season, totaling 45 goals in 111 games as a Blue (a 33-goal pace over 82 games). Buchnevich, like Miller, has become a more-than-a-point-per-game player since leaving the Rangers.

On a night in which the Rangers’ Kid Line (consisting of players that are 21 and 23 years old) scored two of the team’s four goals, Miller provided a reminder of what’s possible with patience with first-round talent, especially first- and second-overall first-round talent.

9. With just under four minutes left in the game, and the Rangers clinging to their 3-2 lead, Mika Zibajenad scored his 25th of the season to give the Rangers a two-goal for the third time. (Jacob Trouba picked up his second primary assist of the game on Zibanejad’s goal. A much-needed start to the “second half” for the captain.) But just like the previous two times in the game the Rangers held a two-goal lead, they let the lead get back to just one goal, and this time it only took 11 seconds for the Canucks to get it back. Elias Pettersson scored with 3:44 left in the game, and a game in which the Canucks were nearly 3-to-1 underdogs would be another hold-on-for-dear-life ending for the Rangers in the final minutes.

10. The Rangers did hold on for their third straight win, and are now six points ahead of Washington (with two games in hand) to stay out of a wild-card berth. I would prefer they got a wild-card berth if it meant playing the Hurricanes in the first round over the Devils, but obviously not if it means playing the Bruins. It’s safer to just stay in the Metropolitan bracket and facing the seem-to-be-superior Devils to avoid the chance of playing the Bruins.

The next 10 days will go a long way in helping determine where the Rangers end up in the postseason bracket. After Friday’s home game against the Kraken, the Rangers go on the road to play the Hurricanes, Canucks, Oilers and Flames before returning to the Garden to host the Jets. Beginning Friday, the Rangers will play six games in 11 days and their remaining 31 games in 63 days, nearly a Rangers game every other night.

I’m glad the Rangers just ended a 10-day layoff and aren’t starting one because after Monday night’s exciting 5-4 overtime win over the Flames, Wednesday night feels like 10 days away, which is when the Rangers will play next.

Here are 10 thoughts on the Rangers.

1. I don’t have a hard time falling asleep. Just ask my wife. I could lie down on a hardwood floor with two children two years and younger playing around me with Mickey Mouse Clubhouse blaring on TV and “The Wheels on the Bus” playing on volume 10 on Alexa and be asleep within seconds. But on Monday night after the Rangers’ 5-4 overtime win over the Flames, I couldn’t fall asleep, which is why I’m writing this with a fatigue headache sitting over my left eye feeling like I was on the other end of a Jacob Trouba open-ice hit.

Between the three blown leads, the five Ranges goals, the nine total goals, the big hits, the fights, the play of Mika Zibanejad and the Kid Line, the kicking motion review (that of course didn’t go the Rangers’ way) and the big saves from Jaroslav Halak, the game had everything. I couldn’t fall asleep because I couldn’t stop watching Trouba lay out Nazem Kadri.

2. It’s rare that a player of Kadri’s ability is on the other end of a hit like that because a player of Kadri’s ability is usually smart enough to not put themselves in a situation like that. Henrik Lundqvist discussed the play after the second intermission on MSG, and broke down how Trouba sets up attacking opponents by making them think for a fraction of a second that there is enough time and space in the middle of the ice for them to cut across before taking away that time and space before they can realize it.

3. It was a clean hit, just like Trouba’s hit in the first period. Just like nearly all of Trouba’s hits are. But every time Trouba makes a hit like the ones he made on Monday night, he immediately has to defend himself in the form of a fight. I get the opposition wanting to stand up for their teammates, but maybe instead of fighting for their teammates they could just tell their teammates to keep their head up when skating with the puck.

4. After Trouba laid out Kadri, the nearest Flame to Trouba was Dillon Dube, so he took it upon himself to fight Trouba. Dube had zero career fights before taking on Trouba and had exactly 20 penalty minutes in each of the last two seasons. Trouba made quick work of him and as Stephen Valiquette said on MSG, “That’s somebody that shouldn’t want that smoke.” So in the span of seconds, Trouba destroyed the Flames’ third-leading scoring, beat the crap out of someone who has no business fighting and got his team a power play thanks to the instigator penalty. There’s nothing more demoralizing than a player jumping another player to stick up for his teammate who got leveled, only to also get his ass kicked.

Trouba takes a lot of shit from Rangers fans (including me) about his play and especially his play relative to his salary cap hit. But his performance in the win over the Flames made him worth every penny.

The Dube instigator led to a Zibenejad power-play goal to give the Rangers a 3-2 lead, so so much for Dube standing up for his teammate and making a statement. Within the next nine minutes of play, however, that lead was gone and the Rangers trailed by a goal.

5. It would have been hard to stomach if the Rangers had lost the game, and they nearly did. They blew a 1-0 lead, a 2-1 lead and a 3-2 lead. They had to overcome a 4-3 deficit with 7:05 left in the game to avoid losing what was a dominating performance. They had to overcome the deficit because the officials and Toronto upheld Andrew Mangiapane’s third-period goal. (I’m glad Mangiapane isn’t a Ranger. It’s hard enough to say and write Leschyshyn.)

I understand why the call was upheld because Mangiapane’s right foot was moving forward after he made contact with the puck. When you see a slowed-down replay it looks like he’s making a kicking motion even though I don’t think he is. But I have seen that same type of goal called back countless times and thought it would be in this instance as well. It wasn’t. That’s the way it goes for the Rangers and goal reviews.

6. Since Artemi Panarin became a Ranger I have called for him to play on a line with Zibanejad. Play the team’s top playmaker with the team’s top goal scorer. (What a concept.) David Quinn would only pair the two when the team was trailing and in full-blown urgency mode in the final minutes of the third period. I have enough problems with Gerard Gallant and his unfortunate similarities to Quinn, but the one thing Gallant can do to separate himself from Quinn to avoid the same fate as Quinn is to keep the two together.

7. Gallant was asked about keeping them together moving forward after the game.

“You’ve gotta give it some time, and I don’t know if I’m going to give it time or not,” Gallant said. “We’ll see.”

I think Gallant made part of that comment in jest, but I’m not 100 percent sure he did. He knows his penchant for changing lines daily is out of control, though I don’t know how he could think of breaking the two of them up. I guess when you’re the guy who healthy scratches Kaapo Kakko in the playoffs and Alexis Lafreniere in the regular season and plays Sammy Blais over Vitali Kravtsov, you could think of breaking up Panarin and Zibanejad.

8. The Kid Line was more than noticeable, driving play and creating chances as Filip Chytill scored a pair of goals and Lafreniere scored the overtime winner. If Gallant could just change out Vesey with Panarin and Zibanejad, and continue to allow the Kid Line to play without the nerves of making a mistake and being benched (or scratched), the Rangers would have a very dangerous top six. They could have a dangerous bottom six as well, but that would entail rebuilding the entire fourth line, which they seem unwilling to do. But to keep the theme of these Thoughts positive after the memorable win and the most entertaining game of the season, I will refrain from writing about the fourth line disaster. (And I won’t mention how Blais hasn’t scored a goal in 53 games with the Rangers.)

9. Lafreniere desperately needed that goal, (as he desperately needs every point he can get), which was just his second since December 7. Chytil looks like he will be a consistent goal-scoring threat and Kakko is starting get his name on the stat sheet with regularity. Now Lafreniere needs to do the same. The trio is never gong to be given PP1 time as long as Gallant is the head coach, so they are going to need to find a way to get their points in the limited final-seconds-of-the-power-play time they do get and at even strength. They are starting to do just that.

10. Coming off a 10-day layoff and at home and given the performance, the Rangers had to have two points from that game. The same goes for their next game on Wednesday night against a Canucks team that isn’t good and an organization that is lost. It’s not often that I expect the Rangers to win, but I expect them to win on Wednesday.