Mika Zibanejad’s scary camp moment could have been worse
There was a scary moment early in Sunday’s training camp practice, as Mika Zibanejad seemingly took a shoulder to the chin from Joey Keane in a battle drill and went down to the ice in a heap. As Zibanejad left for the locker room, it was hard not to think about his long concussion history — including suffering through one last season.
But after all the testing, coach David Quinn said Zibanejad was “fine” and shouldn’t be hampered at all going forward.
“He’s good,” Quinn said. “Just got the wind knocked out of him.”
Quinn said Zibanejad could have played in the preseason opener against the Devils on Monday night in Newark, but he was not set to be in the lineup.
Some regulars set to be in the lineup Monday include a presumed top line of Chris Kreider-Kevin Hayes-Jesper Fast, or possibly Pavel Buchnevich on the right. Young center Lias Andersson is also set to play, and there is no guarantee either he or fellow 2017 first-round pick Filip Chytil will be handed an opening-night roster spot.
“Nobody is guaranteed anything,” Quinn said. “There is no young player guaranteed any spots. People have to earn their time and earn their opportunity. Everybody is getting evaluated and they’re no different.”
Making their Rangers debut will be the two free-agent forwards signed from Europe, Michael Lindqvist and Ville Meskanen, along with defenseman Ryan Lindgren, obtained as part of the Rick Nash deal with the Bruins last season.
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The two goalies, who are each set to play part of the game, are the two likely fighting to be Henrik Lundqvist’s backup — Alex Georgiev and Marek Mazanec. Although all six preseason games are good evaluation tools, Quinn is also paying very close attention to practice.
“Every day is important in practice,” Quinn said. “We’ll see who’s stopping pucks.”
The preseason schedule has the Rangers playing six games in 10 days, and it starts after just two days of on-ice work under a new coach.
“We want to play at a pace, we want to be physical, and structurally, I’m sure there will be a lot of head-scratching and wondering where we should be, but that’s going to happen I think for every team in the National Hockey League after two days,” Quinn said. “So we’re not going to be in a different situation — well, maybe a little bit because a lot of this is new. [Monday] that’s just more of a continuation of the evaluation process.
The Rangers continued to practice with three large groups of players, but Quinn said there is no exact plan for when they might begin cutting the group down to more manageable numbers.
“We really haven’t set a timetable on that,” he said. “We’re going day by day, see how people do, and who deserves to stay and who doesn’t deserve to stay. We’ll get together here shortly and decide what the next move is.”