ROW your boat
Rangers could sail to high playoff seed by avoiding overtime games
It was one night when Alain Vigneault could laugh about it, though other coaches in the league might not think it is such a comedic scenario.
The Rangers headman had to chuckle when asked about the overtime his team played against the Devils on Sunday night at the Garden, a wild five minutes of 3-on-3 — pretty much uninterrupted, end-to-end action — that somehow finished with no goals.
“Oof,” Vigneault said when asked how he dealt with it from behind the bench. “Obviously it’s exciting for the fans, and it’s exciting for us, too. They’re seeing both teams — you take your shot, I’ll take my shot.”
It was the second game in a row — on consecutive nights, no less — the Blueshirts needed a shootout to procure the victory, this one a 3-2 win after a 2-1 win in Nashville on Saturday night. But Vigneault’s team, winners of six of its past seven, has played in just four overtime games through the first 33 contests, and the Rangers’ 21 regulation or overtime wins (known in the standings shorthand as ROW) ranks best in the conference.
This is important because ROW is used as the first tiebreaker for playoff seeding. The first-place Rangers (2310-1) lead the Penguins (207-5) by two points, though the Penguins have two games in hand. And the Rangers are three ROW ahead of the Penguins (18), against whom they continue their schedule with a Tuesday night matchup in Pittsburgh following Monday’s travel day.
“I think everybody is used to it now,” Vigneault said of the new overtime format. “You know that after 60 minutes, if there is over- time, it’s 3-on-3. All teams work on it to some extent. We haven’t had a lot of it this year, but we’ve had a few lately. So we’re getting more used to it.”
The Metropolitan Division, as has been made clear over the past two weeks, is shaping up to be the best in the league. John Tortorella’s Blue Jackets are the hottest team in either conference, winners of eight straight and 10-0-1 in their past 11. The Flyers go into their Monday night match against the Predators having just ended a 10-game winning streak with a 3-1 loss to the Stars in Dallas on Saturday.
The Penguins have a roster almost wholly unchanged from the one that ousted the Rangers in a five-game first-round series last spring en route to Sidney Crosby’s second Stanley Cup title. Alex Ovechkin and the Capitals had a six-game winning streak snapped with a 2-1 loss to Montreal on Saturday.
But the Rangers are in a good spot, not having had to deal with the vagaries of the overtime or the detriment in the standings that comes with winning too many games in the shootout (thus not making it an ROW). And if one position on the roster is happiest about avoiding the extra frame, it’s the Rangers’ goalies.
Rejuvenated starter Henrik Lundqvist has collected three consecutive wins — two of them in the shootout — after his career-long, four-game stint as a healthy backup to Antti Raanta from Dec. 8-13. But the 3on-3 is not exactly his idea of the most equitable way to determine a winner.
But avoiding overtime altogether is the goal, and the Rangers have been better at that than anyone in the conference.
Come playoff seeding time, they surely will be thankful.
“In the end, it comes down to finding a way, finding a way to win,” Lundqvist said. “For the most part, we did a really good job.”