Colin Stephenson: Rangers' Will Cuylle gets a shot at center as Mike Sullivan keeps thinking outside the box
Rangers left wing Will Cuylle looks on before a face-off against the Utah Mammoth in the second period of an NHL game at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 4. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
Mike Sullivan didn’t panic when the Rangers lost their best and most indispensable player, Igor Shesterkin, to a season-ending injury two weeks into the season. It was an unthinkably cruel blow, to be sure, but it’s not as if Sullivan could just throw in the towel on the season after six games.
So, the highest-paid coach in the NHL went to work. Shesterkin being out was his biggest problem, certainly, but not the only one. Backup goalie Joonas Korpisalo already was out with a lower-body injury, and wasn’t going to be back anytime soon.
So Sullivan was left with no other option but to play his No. 3 goalie, 24-year-old rookie Dylan Garand, and try to find ways to support him. When it looked as if Garand might be getting a little tired from overwork, Sullivan tried starting a 38-year-old James Reimer, one day after the team signed him to a contract following a one-game tryout with their Hartford farm team. That didn’t work so well, but Sullivan has kept trying whatever he could, with the pieces he has available, to improve the team in front of Garand.
One of those throw-stuff-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks moves was to try winger Will Cuylle at center on the third line in Tuesday’s 3-1 win over the St. Louis Blues. Cuylle had never played center before, not in the minor leagues, not even in junior hockey or minor hockey. But Sullivan played a hunch.
“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 game, it seemed to work OK. Cuylle won three of five faceoffs (he’s 54% on the season) and while his line – with wingers Oliver Bjorkstrand and Eeli Tolvanen – spent a lot of time early on pinned in their own end, they seemed to get better as the game went on.
“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.”
Eventually, the trio combined on a crucial third-period insurance goal that doubled the Rangers lead to 2- midway through the third period. Cuylle started the play when he intercepted a puck in the offensive zone and passed to Tolvanen on the right, who relayed the puck to Bjorkstrand in the high slot. Bjorkstrand scored into a vacated net for his sixth goal of the season.
“A little different,” Cuylle said when asked how it was playing center. “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 idea of playing Cuylle in the middle first came up publicly during training camp, when a Newsday reporter, noting that there were only four centers on the roster, asked Sullivan if he had a winger who could play center in a pinch. The coach thought about it for a moment and threw Cuylle’s name out as a possibility. When asked about it at the time, Cuylle seemed somewhat bemused by the notion. But when Sullivan asked him to do it, he said he was excited to try it.
Cuylle as a centerman may not be a long term solution, but the willingness to think outside the box to try and find short-term solutions that can help his team win a game is something Sullivan is going to have to continue to do this season.
He’ll get Korpisalo back soon, perhaps as soon as the upcoming road trip. That will help. But it won’t solve all his problems. He still has 68 games left to navigate without Shesterkin, and he’s going to have to keep coming up with ideas if he’s going to somehow keep the Rangers in the playoff discussion.
Blue notes
Korpisalo was loaned to Hartford Wednesday for conditioning purposes, and was expected to play in Hartford’s away game at Hershey Wednesday night.
Colin Stephenson covers the Rangers for Newsday. He has spent more than two decades covering the NHL and just about every sports team in the New York metropolitan area.
