Was watching the replay of the game. Man, this season started out really well, but you could see some of the writings on the wall. There's always a saying that usually teams that get win in a "blowout" game usually don't realize how many mistakes there are during that game.
Great hustle by the players, but man, there were some (what I would call) basic mistakes. Not staying to the inside of your man on defense. A PK where we gave up a stretch pass where we had three of our four on the Rangers' defensive side of center ice when the pass was made within New York's defensive zone.
I think it was a combo of a few things that led to the way the season went, just going back to the first game:
1. We had a ton of energy (opening night, duh), but we could not sustain that over the course of the year. Where we usually have a couple of spurts late in the year that help put us on a run, we just couldn't maintain that pace.
2. I've already mentioned the mistakes, but when you win, wins overshadow mistakes. Until you start losing the games that you used to win. We let our success override the work needed to improve.
3. Once #2 happened, that's when we had to question the effort of players, and I do think that when you could not be certain who was giving their utmost effort at times, it enveloped the team in a dark cloud. No wonder we would get down early, or not have the gas to maintain leads.