Rangers are already battling the mental game in rebuilding year

After opening their season with a third straight loss Sunday night, the Rangers flew back to New York for an off day Monday and a pair of practices before their next chance for their first win Thursday.

Rookie coach David Quinn will go back to the drawing board, surely trying to solidify the defensive structure that got too loose in Sunday’s 8-5 loss to the Hurricanes.

But perhaps just as importantly, he will also be watching for the mood in his room.

“I think you always do as a coach. You want to have the pulse of your team,” Quinn said. “You can see body language and frustration set in when you have the chances we had and the zone time we had [Saturday in a 3-1 loss to Buffalo] and not get rewarded for it. You gotta make sure you manage that. That’s part of being a professional athlete, managing your emotions. That’s a challenge. I think it’s the hardest challenge for any athlete in any sport.”

Expectations were not high for the Rangers (0-3-0) entering the season, but after spending the preseason working on a new system under Quinn, they have yet to see the fruits of their labor beyond flashes.

The frustration grew Sunday, when the goal-starved group finally broke open offensively, only to have the defense, which had played solidly through two games, bring about the demise.

“As good as we were offensively, we were that bad defensively,” Quinn said.

Until the Rangers get back on the ice Thursday at the Garden, where another stiff test awaits against the Sharks, there’s only one sensible way to move forward, according to one of the team’s emerging leaders.

“We can hang our heads and feel bad for ourselves, but no one else does, or we can learn from it,” said winger Chris Kreider, who scored his first two goals of the season Sunday. “Plenty of teams go through tough, trying times during the season, and personally, I’d like to go through it now rather than later. We’re going to find our stride and keep practicing to keep on getting better and continue to work on our process and our system. The best is definitely ahead of us.”

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Quinn has showed willingness to try new looks to get his team going — whether by increasing minutes for one player or decreasing them for another on the fly. He spent Sunday night mixing and matching line combinations, as the Rangers played with 11 forwards and seven defensemen, which allowed him to be more selective in who was sent out on the ice.

“You gotta sense who’s playing well, who’s playing hard and who’s not,” Quinn said of making lines with the odd-man roster. “That’s kind of what we were doing.”

Kevin Shattenkirk played just 7:29 — a career-low, excluding a 2015 game in which he got hurt early — with only 57 seconds of action in the third period. The veteran defenseman, playing his first back-to-back since undergoing knee surgery, got almost half of his playing time (3:22) on the power play. Tony DeAngelo, meanwhile, picked up extra shifts as the seventh defenseman and recorded a pair of assists in 17:34.

That came a night after Kevin Hayes spent much of the final two periods on the bench as rookie centers Brett Howden and Filip Chytil got more involved.

Hayes responded with a stronger game Sunday, as did Vlad Namestnikov — whom Quinn said he was trying to get more time — after the winger was scratched Saturday.

“There’s definitely a lot of stuff we can learn from the first couple games,” Kreider said. “But I think our process is good. The will is there. It’s coming along.”