Rangers’ listless ‘wake-up call’ was a long time coming

This has been a long time coming, at least for the last two weeks in which the Rangers have split six games and been deleterious in one-sided defeats against Florida, Washington and now Buffalo, after Thursday’s Sabres’ 6-1 rout of the Blueshirts at the Garden.

This is what the Rangers are at the moment when Igor Shesterkin, struck down by mortality in allowing five goals on 12 shots before being pulled at 13:51 of the second period, is not a miracle worker.

“It’s been building toward this, definitely,” Chris Kreider told The Post after he and his teammates rolled out passionless and disconnected play. “I don’t think our process has been great. We haven’t been good defensively and we haven’t been good at the things that win hockey games.

“We’ve just had great goaltending and timely scoring. But we’ve been kind of fooling ourselves because we’ve been winning hockey games, but the reason we’ve been winning is that our goaltender has been playing out of his mind.”

It is somewhat ironic, don’t you think, that the bottom fell out on a night on which the Blueshirts were not under siege in their own end and did not allow a plethora of glorious chances from within 5 feet of the net. Indeed, Buffalo was credited with only 12 scoring chances — four defined as high danger — through the second period that ended 5-0.

Instead, the Rangers committed glaring and noisy mistakes, lost essentially every battle in which they chose to engage, and were impotent offensively. How’s this? The Blueshirts cobbled together only five attempts at five-on-five through the first period.