It's been anything but an easy journey for the Rangers this season and Saturday's 5-1 loss to the Los Angeles Kings was just the latest disappointing example.

The loss, which was New York's ninth in their last 12 games, dropped their record to 15-13-1 and has the Blueshirts in fifth place in the Metropolitan Division.

"There's not much positive in this game," said Mika Zibanejad after the game. "From start to finish, just flat. It's a bad game."

He added: "We're just chasing. I think we were waiting for the next guy to do something and it just becomes a waiting game and we have to understand that it's gonna take a lot more than what we did today to get out of this and it's unacceptable."

All of this comes after the Rangers won the Presidents' Trophy last season and began this season 12-4-1, looking like they were on their way to another great year with, perhaps, an ever deeper playoff run than in years past.

Both can still be true, but with the regular season more than a third of the way complete New York has to turn things around quickly before this free fall turns into an all-out nose dive.

However, Saturday's loss did little to inspire confidence that the team is capable of such a turnaround.

"It's tough to have a positive attitude after a game like that," said Vincent Trocheck who added they "gotta be tighter."

"We're letting a lot of things get to us and we need to make sure that we're focusing on what we're doing and not let anything get to us mentally."

Following a win, a tight one at that, on the road against the Buffalo Sabres on Wednesday appeared like it could spark a renewed sense of confidence and possibly a streak of sorts, the Rangers returned to Madison Square Garden and instead laid an egg on their home ice.

Starting off slowly, New York allowed two first-period goals and was down 5-0 in the second period before it ever found the back of the net. At that point, the game was well out of reach.

"It was a horrendous first period," said head coach Peter Laviolette. "First period needed to be a whole lot better than what it was with regard to our energy and our execution, our speed, our attitude. All of that needed to be a lot better."

Igor Shesterkin was pulled from the net in the second period after letting up all five goals and making just 16 saves on 21 shots for a brutal .762 save percentage.

Despite signing a massive eight-year, $92 million contract extension earlier this season, Shesterkin has not been at his best as he has career-lows in save percentage (.907) and goals against average (3.08) while going 10-11 in 22 starts.

However, Shesterkin's struggles aren't the only thing plaguing the Rangers who rank in the middle of the pack in goals scored and goals against. More importantly, their overall execution has been lackluster, which has led to questions about their effort.

"It's frustrating. To start a game like that in our building after playing some of the games that we have in our building... is bad," Laviolette said. "It's a bad start. Right from the very beginning, just the puck movement, the speed in which we were playing, the strides.

"Completely different from where we were a game ago. We can't just play one game like that, we've gotta string together 10 games like that so the consistency in what we're doing is not good. So it's frustrating and disappointing to start a game like that."

When asked where the blame falls on New York's lack of consistency and execution, Laviolette said with everyone.

"It goes right around. We can't start like that. You're not gonna win games if you start like that," he said. "Like I said, last game we couldn't have started the game any better in Buffalo than we did, and then we come back into this building and it's not even close to where it needs to be."

The Rangers will have a chance at a quick revenge on Sunday when they begin a three-game road trip starting in St. Louis where they take on the Blues, but they'll need to wipe Saturday's slate clean or be in danger of letting their slide continue.

"We're headed on the road right now," Trocheck said. "Get into St. Louis, look ourselves in the mirror, tell ourselves we need to be better, show up to the rink tomorrow with just a killer mentality and that's really your only way to fight yourself out of this.

"We gotta be ready to dig our way out and really at the end of the day you gotta stop talking about, you just gotta do it."