Rangers skating into New Year with revamped expectations

The Rangers had some calendar year in 2018 — and they’d like to forget most of what has transpired on the ice.

It began with the Winter Classic win over the Sabres at Citi Field and ended with a 2-1 win Monday night at St. Louis. Coach Alain Vigneault’s record in 2018 was 13-27-4, while David Quinn has taken over this season and has his rebuilding team 17-14-7 going into Wednesday night’s Garden match against the Penguins.

But the Rangers’ combined record of 30-41-11 has taken its toll on the players that have been on both teams. Quinn has them playing hard, but things changed drastically around this franchise in the previous 365 days.

“You look at the record, obviously, it’s been a learning experience and challenging,” an exhausted Henrik Lundqvist said after Monday’s game, in which he made 38 saves as he continues doing everything humanly possible to keep his overmatched team in games. “You have to reset your expectation obviously. That’s been the biggest change, and that was tough, end of last year too. You just had to reset.”

That transition is going to continue as this season progresses, with the schedule ramping up through travel and difficult games. The next three weeks of play will lead into the bye week, beginning Jan. 20. After the Penguins, there is a three-game trip to face Colorado, Arizona, and Vegas, followed by a home-and-home against the Islanders with the second of those, Jan. 12, possibly the last time the two teams will faceoff at Barclays Center, where the Rangers have never won.

And the Feb. 25 trade deadline casts a shadow over the whole operation. General manager Jeff Gorton is not going to change his plans of acquiring young assets no matter how hard this team is playing under Quinn. Which is not to say it isn’t a nice sight for everyone in the organization to see the players reacting to the first-year head coach in such a positive manner, even if the attention to detail comes and goes in the natural way it can with such a young team.

“We understand it’s a transition with a lot of new players, but the best way to build to the future is to win,” alternate captain Mika Zibanejad told The Post. “Is it going to be easy every night, or is it ever easy in this league? Absolutely not. I think just overall, we have a good team. We can win games. We’ve shown that to ourselves, and that’s the only thing that really matters — what we think about ourselves in this locker room.”

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The Rangers had struggled to gain any traction since Thanksgiving, but the sweep of this two-game trip was rather satisfying. They were quick to excoriate their effort against the Blues over the final 35 minutes, when they generated just four shots on goal but somehow managed to hang on to the one-goal lead (mostly due to Lundqvist’s brilliance). But they were tough and resilient against the hulking Predators on Saturday night, and this proud group needed the four points they gained in Nashville and St. Louis to keep their mental well-being.

“I think we have a good group in here, good chemistry, good feeling in the locker room. We believe in each other,” Zibanejad said. “But we just have to keep doing the right thing and give ourselves a chance to win every night. We’re learning, and this was a huge weekend for us.”

So now the new year begins, and with it comes a slew of new challenges, both on the ice for the players and for Gorton in terms of rebuilding the roster. As Lundqvist said, after what happened in 2018, the expectations have changed. But there is no changing the fact that they still want to win every night, which should make the rest of this season at least a little more palatable.

“You can give us compliments and tell us how good a team we are — or the other way around — and we still have to go out and do it. We still have to play,” Zibanejad said. “If we don’t believe in it ourselves, no one is going to.”