Rangers at loss for words of how directionless 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.