SAN JOSE - There is no way to define team chemistry, or to know exactly what it looks like. The only sure thing about it is that every team wants it.
So when the schedule makers give you your longest road trip of the season just three weeks in, as they gave the 2018-19 Rangers, you see it as nothing less than a golden opportunity to get to know one another and kindle some of that chemistry straight off the bat.
Having been together on the road for a full week now, and with a game still to go in Anaheim on Thursday night, the Rangers have been savoring this chance to be away, and to be away together.
"We don't get many long road trips in general. I think the opportunity especially early on to just get away, you're flying, you've got every day on a bus together, going to the rink - you just really have a lot more time as a team," Kevin Shattenkirk said. "It really allows you to get to know everyone, it allows you a chance to get comfortable with everyone. There's a lot of razzing going on.
"Those things to me are the most important parts of being a team, just becoming that close and being able to become more and more comfortable with each other every day. And have a little fun."
Rangers Building Chemistry on Longest Road Trip of the Season
On that last note, when the Rangers found themselves with a scheduled day off in Santa Monica two days before they were to play the Kings on Sunday, many of them walked around the neighborhood and noticed little electric scooters everywhere, randomly strewn along the sidewalks. Throw an app on your phone, scan a bar code and you're off - and when you're done, leave it on the street (it self-locks) to wait for the next rider.
In fact, Brett Howden was in the middle of an interview during that off-day when he got a text from Vinni Lettieri: Let's go grab a couple scooters.
"Oh we definitely got into those," Shattenkirk said. "We were all buzzing around on the beach with those scooters - that was a first. A bunch of us just riding around, went down to Venice (Beach) and checked out Venice for a little while. Hanging out on those things is pretty fun, you understand pretty fast why people love 'em."
As with any group, oftentimes the best way to come together is to gather around a table. Impromptu team dinners are a staple of road trips, although on Tuesday, following the Rangers' game in San Jose, the players and staff gathered at a restaurant nearby their hotel for a long-planned, late, full-team dinner.
It was another bit of scheduling serendipity, coming as it did after perhaps their most complete team effort of the season, a 4-3 shootout victory over the Pacific Division-leading Sharks.
"That's one of the things I love to do when I go on the road, I like to try to do things that I haven't done before, and I like to try new restaurants," said Shattenkirk, who scored the shootout winner in Tuesday's victory, and who counts Vancouver as his favorite road NHL city to visit (he'll have to wait until March 13). "Especially if someone has some local knowledge for me? Grab some of the guys and go try a couple spots out."
For Marc Staal - who on Tuesday played his 773rd game as a Ranger, passing Adam Graves for 10th most all-time among skaters, and who thinks the restaurants in Chicago might make it his favorite away city - the rhythm of road trips has evolved just as his life has during his long career in a Blueshirt.
"I have three kids at home, so walking into a hotel room of silence, for me that is golden," the 31-year-old blueliner said with a laugh. "In the afternoons I like to just kind of relax to myself. But I'm a big dinner guy, and I don't like room service - I'm always looking to go out to dinner with any one of the guys and try new restaurants. Those are some of the best memories, the best times you have - having a good meal, in a different city in a great restaurant? We're pretty lucky that way and we should take advantage of that."
The benefits can go beyond the players. The Rangers, of course, have a new head coach this year in David Quinn, and before his team boarded its first plane of this trip the coach let it be known that he didn't mind one bit to have a long trip fall during his first month behind the Ranger bench.
"Spending time together that normally you don't have a chance to do away from the rink - that's good especially for us," Quinn said. "Not only players-wise but as an organization, as a staff and as a group - it gives you chance to spend more time with each other, and continue to build on what we're trying to achieve here."
Both Quinn and Shattenkirk - not to mention Kevin Hayes, Chris Kreider, Jimmy Vesey, Brendan Smith, Neal Pionk, Brady Skjei and Vinni Lettieri - come from NCAA backgrounds, where players often live together, take most meals together, and spend their days away from the rink as a group. That sort of lifestyle makes team bonding the most natural thing in the world. "It's pretty easy to be in a dorm and roll out of bed and go to class and practice and have three meals fed to you every day," Quinn said. "It's a pretty good life."
"For us being home so much and being in the city, we're spread apart," Shattenkirk said. "That opportunity to get to a hotel - it feels like a dorm room. You're going to guys' rooms, hanging out, watching TV - all those little opportunities make it seem more like a college setting. And I think it's healthy, especially with the young guys that we have, to kind of get into the rhythm of the season and the grind of the season but also at the same time have a little fun and maybe get out and see a couple cities that maybe they never felt they'd be in before."
Shattenkirk recalls cutting his teeth with St. Louis in 2011 and looking to players like Barret Jackman and Alex Steen, who would often take the lead on road trips and take younger players under their wing.
As for Staal, "I remember when I was first, second year, the older guys made sure to invite me to dinner, every night - someone would call me up, 'This is what we're planning, want to come along?' That kind of thing you make sure you pass along."
Following a practice this week in California, peeling off the colors he has worn for 12 seasons, Staal scanned the Rangers' room. "Every room has certain guys from every single walk of life," he said. "The key is to have that respect, that care for each guy in the room, get to know him so that throughout the year you can lean on each other, keep each other accountable. You can't have success without it."
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