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The International colors are officially out at Rangers practice - Henrik Lundqvist was sporting his brand new Sweden mask today, blue with gold trim, the No. 30 on the chin and what looked to be a Statue of Liberty homage to his Rangers, though I only glimpsed that from afar. He’s also got the blue-and-gold pads and gloves that he has practiced with a few times before. Chris Drury also was breaking in his USA gloves, which are blue and white but have no red - disappointing, he said, that they didn’t match the Rangers’ color scheme. The captain also said afterward that he might have started breaking those gloves in sooner, except that his trip to Vancouver, now less than a week away, snuck up on him a bit.

Lundqvist said he can tell the Olympics are coming because just about every day he gets more and more questions about it. After he said that, I kept asking him questions about the Olympics - one of them being why he will wear 30 this time around after his No. 35 treated him to a gold medal in Turin in 2006. Lundqvist said he was supposed to wear 30 in Turin but that it was changed near the last minute, and that changing back was pretty simple this time - identity over superstition. “I’m 30 now. I’m sticking with it,” he said.

This was spoken during a relatively brief interlude between the Rangers’ hour-and-15-minute practice and their meeting/video session, work they are getting in during a rare three-day break in this Olympic year. Lundqvist, Drury, Marian Gaborik and Ryan Callahan - and oh yeah, Finland’s Olli Jokinen - will be busy in Vancouver during the two weeks that follow Sunday’s game against Tampa, but the rest of them are taking vacation, and John Tortorella sees it as his task to make sure they don’t begin that vacation until they’re finished with Tampa Bay on Sunday afternoon at the Garden.

The hope is that these couple of off-days proves beneficial to the likes of Jokinen and Brandon Prust, the newcomers who are getting acclimated on the fly and who will be a particular focus of the video portions today and tomorrow. “We have some work to do with the two new guys, and these types of days where it’s not a game day, just to go over our system again just to keep on trying to let them know how we play,” Tortorella said. “We don’t want to bother them too much during the day of the games, we want them to just be instinctive, so these couple days there’s quite a bit of film with the new guys in it today, just explaining some of our coverages, especially away from the puck. This helps us; it’ll help them.”

Tortorella seemed to be warming to Prust, who has three fighting majors in his first three games as a Ranger. He fought Andrew Peters of the Devils twice in the first period on Saturday night, and in the second period led the rush that ended in Drury’s goal to make it 3-0. Prust skated in practice today with Drury and Brian Boyle, as he did in Saturday’s game.

“I wish I had told him after the first one not to even fight him; I should have,” Tortorella said. “But that’s what I love about the kid, he’s such a willing kid. And then to get rewarded, he makes a good little play there. He’s been responsible defensively. But that was my mistake, I should have gotten to him right after his first fight and told him not even to bother with it anymore. But he’s a guy I have to see more of and maybe put in some different situations.”

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