Mike Sullivan has spent the opening stretch of this season doing what good coaches do when the obvious answers disappear: he keeps digging for the next one.
The Rangers were already in a tough spot after losing Igor Shesterkin to a season-ending injury two weeks into the season. Then Joonas Korpisalo, the backup, went down with a lower-body injury too. That left Sullivan leaning on 24-year-old rookie Dylan Garand, the No. 3 goalie, and scrambling to find ways to make life easier for him.
He even tried a one-day fix when Garand looked worn down, signing 38-year-old James Reimer after a one-game tryout with Hartford and giving him a start. That didn’t solve much. So Sullivan kept searching for something that might.
On Tuesday night in a 3-1 win over the St. Louis Blues, that search led him to Will Cuylle at center on the third line.
Cuylle had never played the position before, not in junior hockey, not in the minors, not even in minor hockey. Still, Sullivan saw enough to take the shot.
“I think Will has all the attributes to play the position,” the coach said at Tuesday’s morning skate. “He takes a lot of faceoffs anyway, so he's comfortable in the faceoff circle, and he's pretty good in the faceoff circle.
“He understands how we play in our own end, playing down low,” Sullivan continued. “There’s more of a responsibility on the center [in the defensive zone] than there is on the wings, but he understands it.
He’s comfortable with it . . . We’ll see what we get, but we think potentially that he’s a guy that we could utilize there, depending on what our team needs are at any given time.”
For one night, it held together. Cuylle won three of five faceoffs, and his line with Oliver Bjorkstrand and Eeli Tolvanen spent plenty of the early going in its own end before settling in as the game went along.
“I think it looked good for the most part,” Bjorkstrand said of the makeshift line. “Obviously Cuylle hasn’t played center, but I thought he did well. We were able to find a bit more chemistry at the end there.”
The trio eventually helped produce a key insurance goal in the third period to make it 2-0 midway through the frame. Cuylle sparked the play by intercepting a puck in the offensive zone and moving it to Tolvanen on the right side, who then fed Bjorkstrand in the high slot. Bjorkstrand finished into an empty net for his sixth goal of the season.
“A little different,” Cuylle said when asked about the switch. “There was a ton of special teams, so there wasn’t a ton of 5-on-5 being played, but I thought overall, not bad.
I thought we had some good chances. I thought our line got better as the night went on.”
The possibility of Cuylle in the middle had been floated publicly back in training camp, when a Newsday reporter asked Sullivan whether he had a winger who could handle center in a pinch. The coach mentioned Cuylle as an option then, and Cuylle, when asked about it at the time, sounded a little surprised by the idea. But once Sullivan asked him to try it, he was eager to give it a go.
It may not turn into a permanent answer, but that isn’t really the point. Sullivan is going to need more of this kind of flexibility all season long.
Korpisalo should be back soon, maybe as soon as the upcoming road trip, which would help. But with 68 games still to go without Shesterkin, Sullivan still has a long list of problems to manage if the Rangers are going to stay in the playoff conversation.
Korpisalo was loaned to Hartford on Wednesday for conditioning and was expected to play in Hartford’s road game at Hershey that night.
In Other News...
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What makes this stretch encouraging is that it is not coming from one player carrying the load. Cuylles versatility, Lafrenires continued rise, Perreaults upside and Kartyes ability to chip in give the Rangers multiple paths to more scoring depth. For a team that has been searching for more long-term certainty up front, that kind of development is exactly the sort of thing that can change the outlook, even if the final shape of the group is still coming into focus. [Read more 🡒]