Tuesday night at Madison Square Garden another standout performance from Derek Stepan helped spur the Rangers to a wild 3-2 come-from-behind victory over the Tampa Bay Lightning.
Stepan scored twice and assisted on Chris Kreider’s go-ahead third period score as the Rangers climbed out of an early 2-0 hole to beat a Lightning team that had won Game Seven of the 2015 Eastern Conference Final over the Blueshirts in their most recent visit to The Garden last spring.
New York won for the second consecutive night, following up Monday’s 4-2 win in Columbus that clinched the Rangers a sixth straight playoff berth. The Blueshirts now have 99 points on the season and remain in third place in the Metropolitan Division.
Stepan, who now has six goals in his last seven games and 14 points in his last eight contests, got New York on the board with a power play goal late in the second period, and then tied things up by sniping a slap shot from the right circle off the rush past Lightning goalie Andrei Vasilievskiy 2:33 into the third period. The goal was Stepan’s 22nd of the season, establishing a new single-season high for him.
Two minutes later Marc Staal sprung Kreider on a breakaway and Kreider buried his second goal in as many nights and fifth in the past six games to give New York its first lead, 3-2, at the 4:46 mark of the third period. Stepan picked up the secondary assist on Kreider’s tally.
The Rangers had been badly outplayed in the opening period, continuing a fairly disturbing recent trend of poor starts. New York was outshot 21-6 and out-attempted 33-11 as Tampa Bay dominated the action and scored the game’s first two goals.
However some solid goaltending from Henrik Lundqvist and strong work on the penalty kill kept the Rangers within striking distance; and late in the second period a power play goal by Stepan cut the Blueshirts’ deficit to one goal, 2-1.
Stepan wired a left-wing slap shot through a Kreider screen at 16:55 of the middle stanza to extend his point-scoring streak to four games and his goal-scoring streak to three. Mats Zuccarello–who assisted on the goal along with Keith Yandle–established a new career-high by registering his 60th point of the season. He would later assist on Stepan’s second goal, as well.
That goal capped a far better middle twenty minutes for the Rangers, who outshot the Lightning 13-8 in the second and established far better zone time in Tampa’s end of the ice. However it didn’t quite match what the Lightning did early in the first period when they scored twice within the opening 6:07 of game action.
Defenseman Andrej Sustr scored off a broken play just 2:42 into the game, and an Ondrej Palat power play shot nicked former Ranger Brian Boyle on its way into the net at 6:07 to put the Rangers in a very early 2-0 hole. At that point New York was already being outshot by a 9-2 margin and things would not get much better in the period as the Lightning were awarded two more power plays, including a five-minute major called against Rangers forward Tanner Glass at 15:57.
Faced with five minutes of penalty killing time after Glass received an interference major and game misconduct for his hit on Tampa’s Vladislav Namestnikov at center ice, the Rangers rose to the challenge and killed off the penalty which bridged the first and second periods. New York followed by killing off penalties to Derick Brassard and Yandle in the first half of the second period, and steadily gained momentum as time elapsed in the period.
A simply brilliant diving save by Lundqvist to rob a wide-open power play scoring chance for Tyler Johnson highlighted a kill midway through the period; and five minutes later Stepan got the Rangers on the scoreboard with a power play goal of his own.
The Rangers ended the night killing off five of Tampa Bay’s six power play opportunities.
(Reprinted with permission of the New York Rangers)
