DALLAS, Texas — There were smiles and honest conversations among the Rangers on Thursday afternoon at the Stars’ practice rink in Farmers Branch.
After president and general manager Chris Drury addressed the team as a whole for the first time since this season has veered off the tracks, a source told The Post, the Blueshirts conducted a fun and energetic session that concluded with a full-team shootout game.
By full team, yes, that meant head coach Peter Laviolette and the rest of the coaching staff, too.
There was a light-hearted aura to the group that has been missing lately.
Vincent Trocheck then initiated a scrum with the Rangers beat reporters to clear the air about a specific report that claimed the team meeting they had after the Kings game was to criticize Drury.
“That could not be further than the truth,” he said bluntly. “If we have a closed-door meeting, with just the players, I think the last that we’d do is complain about our general manager. When we have closed-door meetings in here, it’s about us. It’s about what we can do.
“Obviously, we’re in a little bit of a hole right now, and it’s about what we can do to get out of it. It has nothing to do with management. They do their job. Chris is doing his job to try to put the best players on the ice to succeed. We are those players, and we have to go out there and perform. Do we what can to succeed. I just wanted to clear the air on that.
“There’s a lot of stuff circulating our team right now and when I see something like that, I don’t know where it even comes from. That kind of frustrated me.”
It was a very captain-esque move from the 31-year-old Trocheck, who is not one of the four remaining alternate captains after Barclay Goodrow was waived this past summer and captain Jacob Trouba was traded to Anaheim earlier this month.
There was clearly an initiative taken to get everybody back on the same page after a tumultuous month.
The hits to the Rangers locker room have just kept coming in all different forms.
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Star Russian wing Artemi Panarin (upper-body injury) is skating in a green non-contact jersey, but defenseman K’Andre Miller only just resumed skating in New York after suffering an upper-body injury that landed him on injured reserve.
Two lineup regulars have already been traded, the most recent one unfolding Wednesday night when Kaapo Kakko was sent to Seattle in exchange for two draft picks in 2025 and defenseman Will Borgen.
“Sometimes it doesn’t hit you until several days later,” Chris Kreider said of the trades. “The schedule being what it is, you try to focus on the next game, the next practice, the next moment. It’s the hardest part about the business and something that I’ve dealt with pretty much every year in my career.”
Drury’s league-wide trade memo citing Trouba and Kreider, the club’s longest-tenured player, as available, as well as all the losing has the rest of the NHL rampantly discussing the Rangers.
That’s how details and concrete facts get lost in translation, which prompted Trocheck to set the record straight.
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Drury is regularly meeting with the leadership group and has met with all players one-on-one prior to the full team meeting Thursday. The importance of bringing everybody together has been recognized.
The sounds of a high-tempo practice have been consistent since Laviolette took over but on Thursday, the sounds of joy and laughter were incredibly welcome.
“It was good,” Laviolette said. “Guys get out there and they work. You get into it and everybody’s got to find a way to break through this. Having a practice like that, maybe a little bit lighter, an opportunity to just go out and play, get back to it. The best remedy for all of it is winning and we got to start that [Friday night].”
