Knee sprain could idle Rangers’ Brett Howden ‘a little while’
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The 10-day break that encompassed the bye week and the All-Star Game came at a perfect time for Rangers rookie center Brett Howden. But his refreshed game lasted just over four minutes of ice time on Tuesday night before he suffered a sprained knee and did not return to what would be a 1-0 loss to the Flyers.
Howden, 20, was set to get a MRI late Wednesday afternoon, but the club is still expecting to deal with his absence for some time.
“It could be a little while,” coach David Quinn said.
The season had started really well for Howden, making the team out of training camp and showing a two-way, responsible game. But he hit a rookie wall at some point, and was very much looking forward to the break and then coming back recharged. But now there’s this, and it’s unknown just how long he’s going to be out.
“It’s going to be hard for him,” Quinn said. “I thought he got off to a good start [Tuesday] night as well. I thought the break was going to do him a lot of good, and it certainly did early on. I thought he had a lot of jump in his game, I thought he had his legs. He looked like the guy he was early in the season.
“So I feel bad for him, I feel bad for us. Because when he’s playing like that, he certainly does a lot of good things for us.”
Henrik Lundqvist is set to get the start in nets against the Devils at Prudential Center on Thursday, having come back from All-Star weekend in San Jose and backed up Alexandar Georgiev on Tuesday.
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Quinn spent a good portion of the end of Wednesday’s practice drilling into his team the importance of faceoffs, especially the wingers winning the battles for loose pucks.
“Too many 50-50 pucks and we’re not quick off the line — I call it the line of scrimmage,” he said. “You’ve got to be a little quicker than the guy that you’re lined up against. Too often we’re beat to loose pucks.”
As a team, the Rangers were ranked 30th in the league with a 47.3 percent faceoff win percentage. The only regular center over 50 percent is Howden (50.3), followed by Ryan Strome (49.5), Mika Zibanejad (49.4), Kevin Hayes (48.6) and Boo Nieves (36.7).
“Obviously if you’re a centerman, you get frustrated because you want your stats better,” Quinn said. “But we also want possession. It’s something that I’ll take responsibility for. It’s something we’ve talked about, but we need to spend a little more time on, for sure.”
It looks like Neal Pionk is going to go back to being paired with Marc Staal after Pionk returned from missing four of the previous five games before the break with a lower-body injury. On Tuesday, Quinn dressed seven defensemen, so the pairs rotated quite a bit.
Winger Jesper Fast had a maintenance day on Wednesday but Quinn said “he’ll be able to play” Thursday.