The New York Rangers will finish their four-game Western Conference road trip on Friday night against the Vancouver Canucks, with the second and final meeting between the teams this season set for 7:00 PM PDT and 9:00 PM ET. It is a useful checkpoint for a club that has won four of its last five games and has been getting goals in bunches to keep that momentum going.
The game will be on MSG Network and 1050 AM, but the larger draw is the way the Rangers arrive in Vancouver: with a points pace lifted by Mika Zibanejad, who has a point in four straight games and had his first multi-goal game of the season on Nov. 11. He has 13 assists and 18 points this season, and he has been part of the kind of production that has helped the Rangers score three or more goals in all four of their wins over the last five games.
That scoring run matters because New York has built its season around structure at the other end. The Rangers are 53-for-60 on the penalty kill, rank third in the NHL with an 88.3 penalty kill percentage, and have allowed only three power play goals on the road this season. They have also allowed one or fewer goals six times and two or fewer goals 11 times, while spending 538:02 minutes in the lead. Those numbers explain why the Rangers can travel with confidence, even if the first meeting with Vancouver was a reminder that the margin can disappear quickly.
On Oct. 11, the Canucks scored a season-high six goals against New York. That result is the friction inside Friday's game: the Rangers have strong season-long defensive and special-teams numbers, but they have already shown Vancouver a path to break them down. New York also ranks third in the NHL with 514 hits, is tied for ninth with 81 takeaways, ranks fourth with a 54.5 faceoff win percentage and is tied for seventh with a 2.80 goals-against average, so the road trip finale will test whether those season strengths travel the same way when the matchup gets tighter.
There is also no shortage of familiar names woven through this meeting. J.T. Miller spent parts of six seasons with Vancouver and posted 437 points in 404 games there, while Marcus Pettersson has spent parts of two seasons with the Canucks. Filip Chytil was taken by the Rangers in the first round of the 2017 NHL Entry Draft and played 378 NHL games with New York, and Mike Sullivan spent one season as an assistant coach with Vancouver. For the Rangers, the question is not whether the matchup has context. It is whether the form they have brought on this trip can keep them from repeating the defensive collapse that opened the door the first time these teams met.
