Henrik Lundqvist played brilliantly Tuesday night as he sought his 30th win of the season, but his stellar effort was not enough as the out-of-sync Rangers were beaten by the New Jersey Devils 5-2 at the Prudential Center.
Lundqvist made 31 saves, many of the highlight-reel variety, but the Rangers finished off their season series with the Devils with a loss and a 1-2-1 record. New Jersey’s Cory Schneider made 17 saves in backstopping the victory which snapped a three-game losing skid for the Devils.
“The first period, I thought we played extremely well, but after that it was all them,” explained Rangers head coach Alain Vigneault. “I don’t know if it was a combination of them being that good or us being that bad, but we certainly were not very good. We made tons of mistakes and they made us pay for it. If it wouldn’t have been for Hank it wouldn’t have been a game at all.”
Already without the injured Ryan McDonagh and Rick Nash, the Rangers also had to play without defenseman Marc Staal on Tuesday. He missed the game, and is listed as day to day, after tweaking something in his lower body, according to Vigneault.
“I think it was a little bit of a struggle (playing without McDonagh and Staal),” stated alternate captain Dan Girardi. “Maybe guys had to play with different guys, but we’re all professionals here and I don’t think it was an issue out there. Obviously it’ll be real nice to have those two back soon, though.”
After a good start and a fairly evenly played first period, the Rangers were outworked and outplayed in all phases of the game over the middle 20 minutes and were lucky to be trailing by only one goal, 3-2.
New Jersey outshot New York 17-5 in the second period, turning a 2-1 deficit into a 3-2 lead. The Rangers were pinned for long stretches in their own end, made a slew of turnovers in the middle of the ice, and forced Lundqvist to face a plethora of Grade A scoring chances, including several breakaways.
“That could have been our worst period of the year, not to take anything away from New Jersey,” said Vigneault. “It was mistake after mistake in that second period. Hank kept us in; but the way we played in the second period is why we didn’t win tonight.”
If not for the brilliance of their goaltender, the Rangers should have faced a much steeper deficit by time the buzzer sounded putting a merciful end to the middle stanza at the Prudential Center. It started just 11 seconds into the second period when Lundqvist made a huge glove save to rob Adam Henrique after he had broken in behind the Rangers defense, continued seven minutes later when he did the splits to somehow deny Kyle Palmieri who had streaked in untouched from right wing. and seemed to hit a crescendo at 9:20 when he scrambled to make three saves in one wild sequence. Lundqvist put an exclamation point on his second period heroics when he robbed former teammate John Moore on another breakaway at 14:10.
Still the Devils were able to manage to score twice in the period against Lundqvist. Palmieri’s power play one-timer tied the score, 2-2, at 10:28; and former Blueshirt Lee Stempniak gave New Jersey a 3-2 lead at 18:06 when he sniped a one-timer from the left circle after a long prolonged shift in the Rangers end of the ice.
“I don’t know what happened, though you have to give them a lot of credit, they worked extremely hard,” Lundqvist said of the Devils. “They are a really hard-working team, and that’s how they score most of their goals. If you don’t match that, it’s going to be an extremely tough night; and that second period was definitely a tough period for us. I don’t really have a good explanation for how we played.”
As if things were not bad enough for New York, J.T. Miller received a match penalty with one second remaining in the period when he fought New Jersey’s Sergey Kalinin and cut him with a punch thrown by his taped right hand. Not only did the Rangers lose one of their best forwards, but they were forced into a five-minute penalty kill to start the third period.
However the Rangers allowed only shot on goal while killing off that major penalty, and, in fact, had the best scoring chance during those five minutes when rookie defenseman Brady Skjei–recalled from Hartford earlier in the day–nearly scored his first NHL goal, instead chipping the rebound of a Jesper Fast shorthanded shot just over the crossbar.
“J.T. was just trying to lift the team before the end of the second period because we didn’t have a good period,” explained Derick Brassard. “The penalty kill got the job done, and it’s something we talked about at the end of the second period–if we kill that maybe we have the momentum on our side; but they played really tight after that and we couldn’t find a way to break through.”
Things had seemed much brighter for the visitors earlier in the night when the Rangers climbed out of a 1-0 hole by scoring twice in a 45-second span midway through the first period. Kevin Hayes buried the rebound of a Viktor Stalberg shot at 8:17 to offset a game-opening goal scored on a deflection by New Jersey’s Tyler Kennedy. The goal was the 11th this season for Hayes and gave him seven points in his last seven games (4-3-7).
Then at 9:02 Dominic Moore redirected a slick feed from Keith Yandle past Schneider for his sixth of the season. Rookie Marek Hrivik, playing in his second NHL game after being called up from Hartford on Sunday, picked up his first NHL point with the secondary assist on Moore’s go-ahead goal.
There were a few other real good scoring chances for New York, including a pair of Derek Stepan shots which found iron instead of the back of the net, but those two goals in 45 seconds were it for the Rangers. Schneider’s best stops were made on separate golden chances late in the second for Miller and Fast.
Kalinin put the Devils up 4-2 by scoring on a clean breakaway with 2:44 to play in regulation and Adam Larsson finished things off with an empty-net goal at 19:31.
Since it is expected that either Staal or McDonagh–if not both–should be ready to play by time the Rangers return to action Thursday night in St. Louis against the Blues, Vigneault said it is not likely that Skjei will travel out to the midwest with the team on Wednesday. However Skjei made a solid impression with his performance in New Jersey where he led the team with 22 minutes 17 seconds worth of ice time.
“I thought he played alright,” said Vigneault after the game. “You can see he can skate and he’s got a good skill level. Unfortunately as a team we didn’t play that well in front of him.”
Jim Cerny
BlueshirtsUnited.com
(Reprinted With Permission of the New York Rangers)
