Henrik Lundqvist was decked out in his full Team Sweden regalia for the Rangers’ practice on Monday. That included NHL-sized pads the goaltender will wear in the Olympics, even though IIHF and IOC rules would permit him to play with larger-sized equipment.
“I prefer these,” said Lundqvist, who will be in nets for the Blueshirts Tuesday night when the Avalanche visit the Garden. “I’m able to move more easily.”
Lundqvist then dropped to the locker room floor and brought his sky blue-and-yellow-trimmed pads together in a display of how he covers the five-hole. He scoffed at those who had attributed his early difficulties to the approximately 2-inch reduction in pad length coupled with enhanced enforcement by the NHL this season.
“The people who said that the pads were the reason I was not playing well, or said I’d been good before because I’d been cheating, maybe I’d care if they weren’t ignorant about the game and the position,” Lundqvist told The Post.
“You close your pads at the knees, not at the tops. The way I play, staying back and then moving across, the change has actually helped me.”
Yes, the Rangers are a more cohesive unit, and yes, the Blueshirts have settled into a structure in which their roles are clearly defined, but Lundqvist’s return to elite form in 2014 from wherever he had been for most of the final month of 2013 is the primary reason for the club’s climb in the standings to second place in the Metro Division.
Lundqvist will enter the match against Patrick Roy’s Avalanche having allowed two goals or fewer in nine of his last 10 starts, a stretch beginning Jan. 8 in Chicago, through which he has recorded a 1.50 goals-against average and .951 save percentage.
Following a brilliant performance in Friday night’s 4-1 victory over the Islanders, The King referred to how his focus was back where it should be.
“When you’re losing, you tend to focus on things that don’t really matter,” he said.
After Monday’s practice, he clarified what he had meant.
“When you’re struggling, you go into the game thinking, ‘I have to do well; I have to win the game,’ but that is counter-productive,” Lundqvist said. “What really matters is what you have to do to stop the next shot. That’s where you have to be focused.
“I always say that you can’t worry about the end result, but that’s what I was doing. If you do that, you’re never going to get there.
“Sometimes, you can’t help yourself. You want to win so badly, you want to win every game, but you can’t put the kind of pressure on yourself when you go into a game thinking, ‘I have to win.’ That’s what I found myself doing.”
Lundqvist said he studied video in December, “and went back to the basic stuff.”
“It starts with a good mental outlook; it’s not just going to happen,” he said. “You have to do the right things in practice for it to turn around.”
The Rangers’ final two games before the Olympic recess are back-to-back on Thursday and Friday, home against the Oilers before the following night’s match in Pittsburgh. Coach Alain Vigneault suggested he is more likely than not to give Cam Talbot a start in one, even though he knows, “Hank likes to play back-to-back.”
Vigneault also said Lundqvist’s workload in Sochi will factor into the Rangers’ goaltending rotation when the schedule resumes with three games in four nights beginning Feb. 27.
“I expect him to play a lot and I expect him to come back as one of the later guys [before] we start,” the coach said. “Cam’s going to get some work coming out of the Olympics.”
Which Lundqvist — whose Team Sweden is coming off a disappointing fifth-place finish in 2010 after having won the gold in 2006 — will play in NHL-regulation pads.
http://nypost.com/2014/02/03/rangers-lundqvist-to-don-nhl-sized-pads-for-sochi/
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