Rangers have no answers for why season has gone down hill so fast

From the perch of Mika Zibanejad, this has been different. The Rangers still lost plenty of games at the start of the season. Still unintentionally constructed the shaky foundation that has since cratered all the way to last place in the Eastern Conference.

But the “effort was there,” Zibanejad said Wednesday, after the Blueshirts lost, 8-4, to the Senators and hit another low in a 48-game stretch full of them. The process was sound. The Rangers were content with how they performed, even as they started 3-5-2 and didn’t win a home game until Nov. 10. Inside the desolate dressing room at the Garden, Zibanejad wanted to be careful. He didn’t want to imply that the Rangers weren’t putting in effort now.

“But I’m just saying I thought our game played better,” Zibanejad said. “We deserved better early on. … And that’s a tough pill to swallow, and we have to find a way to, I don’t know — it’s definitely a challenge. We’re right in it right now, and we have no other option than to just go right through.”

Everything managed to get worse for the Rangers on Wednesday. They were booed — with “fire Drury” chants — on their home ice, their goaltender was pulled after allowing six unanswered goals and they lost for the ninth time in 11 games.

They’ve lost any semblance of the consistency that followed this group when it was a legitimate contender. The roster could look entirely different by the second week of March, when the dust from the trade deadline settles and the reality of Chris Drury’s sell-or-not-to-sell decision takes shape.

And in the present, the Blueshirts are left grappling with how different they are from the version they thought they assembled in October with plenty of returning pieces.

“We’ve gone through a rash of emotions,” coach Mike Sullivan said Wednesday when asked about his group’s lack of pushback or fight after falling behind. “There’s been tons of anger. … We’ve run through the gamut of emotions here trying to right this thing and get it going in the right direction. And we’ll continue to try to solve it.”

The Rangers’ most pressing challenge currently revolves around their own mindset, Sullivan said. They’ve abandoned an instinctive approach — one oozing with “good swagger and confidence” — and have instead started forcing things, which impacts their decisions. They are, overall, just trying too hard, even if the appearance doesn’t always resemble that, and center Vincent Trocheck echoed a similar sentiment.

Across the first 19 games of the season, when the Rangers weren’t rewarded with points despite sound play but still ended up with a 10-7-2 mark, they allowed 2.5 goals per game. A shutout loss to the Capitals on Oct. 12 featured the caveat of “this type of game is the kind of game that we’re trying to build” from Sullivan. The Blueshirts fell to the powerful Avalanche in overtime Dec. 6, but settling for a point seemed acceptable given the type of game they played.

During their past 29 games, that goals-per-game number has ballooned to 3.4 amid a disastrous 10-15-4 stretch. The Senators surpassed that average by the time the first period ended.

“We’ve gotta play the game hard,” Sullivan said Wednesday, “and that’s some of the discussions we’ve had with the group is playing the game with a competitive spirit and playing the game hard — being willing to skate, being willing to embrace contact, going to the hard areas, winning puck battles, things of that nature. But we have to play smart also.

“It’s a whole lot more difficult to be collective effort than it is to be isolated effort, and I think we’re not quite connected like we were and that’s what we’ve gotta get back to.”

This isn’t the Rangers group from the start of the year, when they hovered around the playoff cutline. This isn’t the formidable group from past seasons, either — the comeback kings, the dynamic power-play scorers, the formidable top six packed with goal-scoring options. Drury’s latest coaching hire in Sullivan hasn’t generated the intended spark, unlike when Gerard Gallant and Peter Laviolette were hired and campaigns with 100-plus points followed.

Despite wanting to never feel what they did during last Saturday’s 10-2 Boston embarrassment again, a night like Wednesday materialized just days later.

And it served as the latest reminder of how far the Rangers have fallen.