Buchnevich made an even bigger splash at Saturday's morning skate in Westchester, where he wore a United States jersey - No. 17 and "Brown" on the back - to settle up a bet won by assistant coach Greg Brown when the Americans knocked off Russia in the semifinal of the World Junior Championships back in January.
How did Buchnevich look out there?
"Beautiful," said Quinn, a former USA Hockey player and coach himself. "Beautiful. Not happy." It took until March for Buchnevich to pay up because Brown couldn't locate a jersey right away.
"Brownie had to dig deep for that one, and Buchie delivered on his bet," Quinn said.
He delivered in a big way on Thursday night, too, which came two nights after Quinn said he wasn't overly thrilled with the winger's evening in Dallas. "To come back the way he did I thought really showed maturity and I thought was another step in his development," the coach said on Saturday. "He's been playing good hockey for about three weeks now. It's no coincidence, the way he's been competing and skating, he's been getting rewarded offensively - that's usually how it works. I'm just really happy where his game's at now."
Not joining the team for that morning skate was Marc Staal, who had been playing through the flu during the Rangers' two-game road trip to Dallas and Detroit and will sit out tonight's game - the first game Staal will miss this season.
"He's recovered. I don't know if he's fully recovered, but this has been a long year for him," Quinn said. "It's a guy who's played a lot of minutes for us, he's been a warrior. Battling the flu, I probably shouldn't have played him the other night. Told him to take the complete day off and come back in on Monday."
The Rangers jumped all over the Devils in the teams' most recent meeting, a 5-2 Garden win on Feb. 23 in which the Blueshirts scored three times in the game's first 14:23. Quinn pointed to that game as a point at which the Rangers were really getting their game right: "We played the Devils, and the next four or five games after that we played good hockey. We were purposeful and we had the right intentions and there was a cohesiveness - it was a good feeling, even though we were only getting one point. I thought starting against Dallas and even through Detroit, we lost that a little bit. I think maybe the frustration level of losing kind of caught up to us a little bit."
Both teams on Saturday will be looking to losing streaks of different natures: The Rangers have points out of four of their last six losses (0-2-4), while the Devils are 0-4-1 in their last five. New Jersey is playing the second of seven straight road games, a stretch that began with a 3-0 loss in Washington on Friday night.
Injuries have piled on the Devils this season, most notably the knee injury that has knocked out reigning Hart Trophy winner Taylor Hall since December, required surgery in February and seems likely to cost him the rest of the season. But their leading scorer, Kyle Palmieri, returned to the lineup in Washington after missing four games with an lower-body injury.
