David Quinn’s challenge: Keep Rangers relevant during rebuild

The Rangers probably aren’t going to be as young as you might expect, for much — if not most — of the rebuild will take place off-Broadway in places like Chelyabinsk, St. Petersburg, Lulea, Madison and Hartford.

So that means that while the likes of Vitali Kravtsov, Igor Shestyorkin, Nils Lundkvist, K’Andre Miller and, more likely than not, Libor Hajek, Ryan Lindgren and Brett Howden develop elsewhere, the Blueshirts of David Quinn will present largely the same cast of characters who were aboard the sinking ship for at least the final month of 2018-19.

The challenge, thus, is manifest for this group that will feature fewer young headliners than, say, the 2007-08 team did that had 22-year-old Ryan Callahan, 21-year-old Brandon Dubinsky, 23-year-old Dan Girardi, 21-year-old Marc Staal, 24-year-old Fedor Tyutin and 25-year-old Henrik Lundqvist in major roles.

The challenge will be for Quinn, who becomes the Rangers’ first, first-time NHL coach since Bryan Trottier’s ill-fated, 54-game foray behind the bench in 2002-03, to oversee a credible product in a year when the focus will be more on tomorrow than today.

The challenge will be for Quinn, following five years as head coach at Boston University, to create a competitive team out of a group led by a 36-year-old goaltender and a core in its mid-20’s in a season when a second straight playoff miss is more or less assumed.

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“We want to win every hockey game,” said Quinn, whose team will go through on-ice testing Friday following Thursday’s medicals. “We want to come to the rink every day and be the best team we can possibly be. Our job is to make every player better on a daily basis, and if we do that, we’ll be better collectively and the winning and losing takes care of itself.

“We think we have a bunch of returning players who maybe didn’t have great years last year and feel like they’re going to have much better years this year. Our job is to simplify it for them on a daily basis.”

Change will be obvious following the five-year tenure of Alain Vigneault, under whom the Blueshirts won six playoff rounds while reaching one Cup final and another conference final in his first four seasons behind the bench before last season’s collapse and dismissal.

The greatest changes are likely to be in the amount of time the Rangers practice and in the system Quinn installs following a year (or more) in which rest and recovery were prioritized over getting on the ice on off-days and chaos reigned in the defensive zone.

This probably wouldn’t be the place for Allen Iverson.

“If we want to talk about getting better on a daily basis, practice is so important,” said Quinn, who foresees no issues in making the adjustment from communicating with college kids to professional athletes. “We want to be a fast, physical, relentless hockey team.’’ and you can’t play that way unless you practice that way. We’ve got to do this together. This is a ‘We’ thing.

“Our job is to get the guys to embrace our system and what we’re going to do not only defensively but in all three zones. To me, it’s creating a mentality in all three zones, five-man gaps, staying on top of people and trusting each other. Every coach does it differently, and just because you do it differently doesn’t mean you’re disrespectful of the way it was done before you took over.”

Lundqvist, who from November through mid-January played some of the most superior hockey of his decorated career (.932, 2.32, 18-8-2), will again be the standard bearer whose work will be determinative to his team’s success.

“I think he’s got a great mindset,” the coach said of the goaltender, with whom he met in Sweden in July. “He wants to be part of the next wave and win a Stanley Cup here. He’s in incredible shape, he’s an incredible competitor and he’s one of the best in the business.”

There will be competition for jobs, true, but most of the new wave will have to knock veteran incumbents out of spots. Twin ’17 first-round centers Filip Chytil and Lias Andersson each have a leg up, but they will have to earn their varsity letters. Same for Neal Pionk and Tony DeAngelo, whose lives were complicated by Tuesday’s acquisition of 31-year-old right side defenseman Adam McQuaid, as well as for Hajek, Lindgren and Howden.

Quinn said there is no over-arching organizational philosophy about whether the kids’ development would be better served by playing major roles with the AHL Wolf Pack rather than in supporting, fourth-line or third-pair duties in New York.

“That’s a case-by-case situation,” the coach said. “Every guy is different. You might put a guy in Hartford because he’s going to play more minutes, but it might be more beneficial for him to stay here and experience NHL life.”

In other words, youth will be served, but maybe not as much in New York as you are anticipating.