The Rangers played one of their best games of the season Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden, overcoming a brilliant 46-save performance by Vancouver goalie Ryan Miller to beat the Canucks 3-2 in overtime.
J.T. Miller scored the game-winning goal with 1:06 remaining in overtime, grabbing the rebound of his own shot, carrying it behind the Vancouver net, and then scoring on a wraparound.
Trailing 2-1 entering the third period only due to the excellence of Miller in the Vancouver net, the Rangers finally were able to tie the game on their 14th shot of the final period of play. Mats Zuccarello drove to the net to score his team-leading 17th goal of the season at 11:46. Keith Yandle picked up the primary assist with a perfect pass from along the right-wing wall, and Rick Nash earned his second assist of the game by hustling down a loose puck and rimming it along the boards to Yandle.
Shortly after Zuccarello tied the score, Dominic Moore wristed a shot between Miller’s pads, but the puck struck the far post, the fifth time the Rangers hit iron Tuesday night.
Henrik Lundqvist made 18 saves for the Rangers, and faced only two shots the entire third period; but it was the goalie at the other end of the ice who grabbed The Garden spotlight.
It wasn’t only the number of saves Miller made, it was the amount of quality chances he stared down and turned aside with one highlight-reel save after another as the Rangers poured the pressure on right from the first drop of the puck Tuesday.
If it wasn’t Miller making one spectacular save after another it was the iron goal posts and cross bar behind him thwarting the Rangers at every turn as the Blueshirts trailed 2-1 after two periods of play despite largely controlling the action for 40 minutes.
New York outshot Vancouver 17-11 in the first period yet hit the intermission down 1-0; then followed up with a 13-6 shots advantage in period number two only to be trailing 2-1 heading into the third period.
Perhaps the true tone of the night came on the game’s first shift when Yandle blasted a shot off the cross bar after a pretty behind the back pass from defense partner Kevin Klein just 22 seconds into play. New York would ring the pipe three more times–all in the second period–when a Nash slap shot through traffic found the far post on Miller’s stick side, and Ryan McDonagh twice hit the post, once at 15:18 off a rebound attempt in the low slot and the second at 18:43 when he blasted a long slap shot past Miller and glove side off the post.
Miller, coming off an outstanding 47-save performance Sunday against the Islanders, though was as terrific as he was lucky on Tuesday. In the first period alone the Rangers had no fewer than six Grade A scoring chances which were denied by the Canucks 35 year-old netminder, including point-blank shots from J.T. Miller and Viktor Stalberg.
Despite their dominance, the Rangers ended up surrendering the first goal of the game at 9:32 of the first period when Bo Horvat carried the puck behind Lundqvist’s cage and swung a pass out in front where Sven Baertschi deposited the puck into the cage for his eighth goal of the season.
The Rangers pulled even at 4:18 of the second period, scoring on a delayed penalty call. With an extra attacker on the ice the Rangers patiently zipped the puck around the offensive zone, ultimately leading to a Chris Kreider shot, a deflection by Nash, and a rebound goal by Derek Stepan. The goal was Stepan’s ninth, and Kreider’s assist extended his point-scoring streak to four straight games.
On the next shift Nash hit the post, and ten minutes later McDonagh did the same. Right afterwards Vancouver won a battle for the puck deep in the Rangers end of the ice and former Blueshirt Emerson Etem found Alexandre Burrows wide-open to the right of Lundqvist. Burrows buried Etem’s pass to give the Canucks a 2-1 lead at 16:11 of the second period.
The frustration grew early in the third period when first Vancouver’s Miller robbed New York’s Miller with a sharp glove save on an uncontested backhander from in front just 49 seconds into the period, and then 20 seconds later Jesper Fast danced around Canucks defenseman Alex Edler for a clear break at the Vancouver net only to shoot the puck wide of the mark after being challenged by Miller.
