The Rangers' sloppiness on the ice in Washington on Tuesday was matched by the Yankees' sloppiness on the field in the Bronx the following night.

That and $2.90 apiece will give the Blueshirts a subway ride to the Garden for Friday's game against a young and hungry Ottawa team.

The mishap in DC that resulted in a cosmetically narrow 5-3 empty-net defeat – the award-winning cosmetician was Igor Shesterkin – seemed to have caught everyone's attention after head coach Peter Laviolette unprompted pointed out the (lack of) attitude of the club immediately after the game.

“We took care of it,” Braden Schneider told The Post after Thursday’s point practice. “We know what our standard is. They want to perform at the level to compete for the Stanley Cup.

“If you don't come to the stadium ready to work and just think that you're just going to come in and score six goals with your talent, you're not going to have a chance of winning. And I think we touched on that.

“Everyone here knows what needs to be done and we know we have to do better,” said No. 4. We weren’t the other day.”

The problem is that the mirror doesn't lie like a 6-2-1 record.

Through the first month of the season, the Rangers are near the bottom of the NHL when it comes to nearly every key defense-related metric available.

It's almost breathtaking.

The Blueshirts allow the sixth-most attempts at five-on-five and the eighth-most shots per 60:00.

They have the fifth-worst expected goals chance, they have allowed the sixth-most scoring chances and the fourth-most dangerous chances.

But with Shesterkin and Jonathan Quick almost consistently brilliant in producing the third-best save percentage at five-on-five, the club's goals-against rate is third best.

That has obscured the number of mishaps, mental errors and general chaos in the D-zone in the same way that hitting multiple home runs can obscure baserunning and fielding errors. The thing is, it doesn't last forever.

And by the way, there's no better time than now for the Rangers to take down the Senators, who enter this game as the third-highest scoring team in the NHL with 4.23 goals per goal, having scored eight goals twice and five goals once and scored four goals three times in the last seven games.

To achieve this, the club must improve both its attention to detail and commitment. Laviolette cited a lack of “pop” after both the loss to the Caps, who beat his team in the opening round last year, and the Oct. 24 Garden loss to the Panthers, who the team beat at Eastern -final was eliminated.

Without pop, it's difficult to express the attention to detail.

“If you lack attitude, you have no chance of learning details. “The last game was an example of how, other than Shesty, we just weren’t where we needed to be to have a chance of winning,” said Schneider. “I think we came in there and they came out because they wanted to prove something. I think that was the main difference.

“Attitude comes first. You can win a game just by winning battles. When you win every battle for the puck, you don’t have to focus on details, you know what I mean?”

Schneider will skate on the left side of the third pair with Vincent Mancini for the second game in a row. Laviolette split the K'Andre Miller-Adam Fox and Ryan Lindgren-Jacob Trouba tandems in the third period in DC, while falling back to the traditional Lindgren-Fox, Miller-Trouba pairings that had been intact for the past four seasons, but it said Miller-Fox and Lingren-Trouba at training together.

“We talked about changing things, starting with Key and Foxy,” the coach said. “They were a pretty good pair, their numbers and their performance on the ice.

“Last night was just a reflection of our absence, so we need to get back on our feet and sort this out. Overall, the couples who were together did a pretty good job. But I would never take out a pen and write something down with a permanent marker.”

However, you can engrave this in stone with a chisel, and if the Rangers don't tighten it up with and without the puck, they won't continue at the 118-point pace.

“Every now and then you bring it up and then move on,” Laviolette said. “We touched on a few things.

“The training and commitment of the players was excellent.”