The Rangers are still not playing their best hockey as the second half beckons

The 60 minutes the Rangers played and took down a pretty good Golden Knights team 4-1 at the Garden on Friday night served as quite a microcosm of the now-concluded All-Star stretch of the season.

Because the Rangers weren’t as impressive as acknowledging the indispensable star work Jaro Halak provided in net. They gave a lot of chances. They were never really in control. Their game wasn’t quite a piece. That’s the impression they’ve made through the first 49 games.

Maybe that’s not fair, because in a business where results make up the result, the Rangers got the result here, and they’ve been consistently getting results over the last 23 games, going 16-4-3. reaching a low of 11-10-5 on December 3rd.

Maybe that’s not at all fair to describe a team that enters the break ranked eighth in NHL scoring at .633 with a 27-14-8 overall record.

When you go through something like we did the first couple of months, everything goes smoothly. It’s not pleasant, Chris Kreider, whose 20th goal gave the Blueshirts a 1-0 lead late in the first period, told The Post. You focus on improving every day. You look inward. You learn about yourself and your teammates.

And you will be stronger when you get through it. It’s not just a cliché. We were a better team now than we would have been without these setbacks. It’s real.

This was a mess right from the start. Vegas created a pass for Class A opportunities. Halak, coming off a five-game hitting streak in which he has a .937 save percentage and 1.81 goals-against average, turned them all aside.

(Yes, all of them, the one goal he gave up to Phil Kessel early in the second period to cut the Blueshirts’ lead to 2-1 came off his body shot from under the goal line. Mark one for the goal. harmless chance.)

The reality is that Halak, who struggled in training camp and early in the season, gives the Blueshirts their best backup goaltender since Aleksandar Georgiev deep into the 2019-20 season, when he shared the net with Igor Shesterkin.

In fact, it was a measure of faith for head coach Gerard Gallant (and goaltending coach Benoit Allaire, who always believes in his guys) to start the 37-year-old veteran on nine days’ rest and Shesterk’s apparently good health.

The Rangers apparently have a tandem.

The Kreider-Vincent Trocheck-Barclay Goodrow unit played hungry hockey. They were aggressive in the zone, kept it simple and got to the net. Kreider got his goal when a Trocheck drive glanced off his leg. He didn’t get in the way the next time Trocheck buried Goodrow’s center pass for a 2-0 lead in the bottom of the first.

Kreider argued that this sample of loud hockey represents, or could become, the Rangers’ identity.

I think when we did the right things we were a good team and we did them more often than not, the winger said. It was hard to beat when we set up the forecheck, when we break the puck out cleanly, when we get puck support through the neutral zone.

The Artemi Panarin-Mika Zibanejad-Jimmy Vesey unit had several shifts where the trio threatened, albeit without a goal. And the Kids were more than just energetic: Filip Chytil got his eighth goal in his last 11 games on the third try on two whiffs to give the Rangers a 3-1 lead at the 14:20 mark of the third period.

Will Cuylle made his Garden debut and was challenged by Keegan Kolesar, one of the league’s best-known enforcers, to drop the gloves for the opening draw of the second period. It hardly seems to be within the code, but the Blueshirts’ 20-year-old rookie accepted the challenge in his second NHL game and did just fine.

Good for him, Gallant said. A tough guy challenged him. He appeared.

Rangers do more than just perform. They win, even if they don’t always rack up the style points. That is not the case.

The thing is, the Blueshirts have the eighth-best record in hockey. The thing is, they are seven points out of the playoffs. The thing is, the Rangers haven’t played their best hockey yet.

The second half is calling.