It’s funny how quickly a seven-game winning streak could become a two-game losing streak, eh? That’s the position the New York Rangers find themselves in after tonight’s 2-1 loss to the Florida Panthers in Sunrise. There are many similarities between tonight’s loss and Saturday’s loss against the Habs, which suggests that the Rangers, again, suffered from struggling to generate offense. Indeed they did, and it’s a scary thing to think about considering the schedule will only get tougher from here.
For the first twenty minutes of this game, the Rangers looked like the same team that was pushed over rather easily on Saturday when they lost, 4-0, to the Montreal Canadiens at the Bell Centre. They showed little to no life at all and spent the majority of the opening stanza chasing the Panthers around in their own zone. Eventually, at 10:06, the Cats struck on the powerplay when Jason Garrison rifled a slap shot to the back of the net from the point.
Still, at the beginning of the second period, New York did not receive the wake-up call they needed as they allowed another goal in the first two minutes. This time it was Tomas Fleischman connecting with Kris Versteeg in the slot, uncontested, to put the Panthers up 2-0. The Rangers were caught standing around on this play and their lack of coverage left Lundqvist exposed.
The Rangers would answer back, though, when Marian Gaborik found a trailing Derek Stepan, who fired a low wrister past Jose Theodore at 4:18 of the second period. The play began with a nice defensive play by Ryan McDonagh, and then it was all Marian Gaborik from there, holding the puck in the offensive zone until a teammate became open.
With the score at 2-1 at that point, Andre Deveaux made a foolish mistake by raising his elbow high on Tomas Fleischman in the neutral zone, which he was given a 5-minute major and a game misconduct for. It’s a suspendable play for sure, but more importantly, it probably wrote him a one-way ticket back to the Connecticut Whale of the AHL, because he could’ve cost his team the game right then and there.
Thankfully he didn’t because of the incredible penalty-killing efforts by the Blueshirts to keep the Panthers off the board despite being down a man for five straight minutes. 2-1 would be the way the second ended, and for the Rangers, it wasn’t such a bad position to be in considering what had gone on in the first forty minutes of the tilt.
The Rangers blew their fourth straight powerplay opportunity early in the third period, but as I said on Twitter, they are lucky that they are just as good at penalty-killing as they are bad on the powerplay, because they had to kill off two penalties of their own afterwards. A huge part of that was the play of Henrik Lundqvist, who gave the Rangers a chance to win the entire night. Unfortunately to no avail, though, as his team couldn’t get the tying goal and ended up losing, 2-1.
Lundqvist was forced to make 36 saves on 38 shots faced tonight, so it’s only fair to say that he did his part in this tilt. Without Lundqvist this game probably wouldn’t have even been close, so the Rangers certainly owe a thank you to their goaltender for saving them from embarrassment.
The offense gave Lundqvist no help, and have become a developing problem since they’ve only scored one goal in their past two games. Tonight, the Rangers had offensive pressure in spurts, but never maintained a solid forecheck for an extended period of time as they did throughout their winning streak. They weren’t as bad as they were in Montreal, but Jose Theodore had a relatively easy night other than the last five or so minutes of the third period.
There’s no doubt that the powerplay is a big contributor there because only a handful of shots on four powerplay opportunities is not going to cut it, and Anton Stralman didn't help very much. I’m not sure what was said or worked on in practice, but the Rangers looked no better with the man advantage tonight than they did on Saturday. Again, there’s too much standing around and very little shooting, and for me it’s getting extremely frustrating to watch.
All in all, the Rangers need to get it going offensively in time for Friday’s meeting with the Washington Capitals. Whether it’s more urgency or more shooting, or a combination of several things, the Blueshirts need to fix it before Friday.
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