SEVEN IS HELL
’Twas the ghost of seasons past at the Garden on Friday night for a 7-4 Rangers loss to the Wild that came three days after a 7-2 pasting in Pittsburgh.
The scope of the drubbings by these two very good teams not only will hang over the three-day Christmas recess, but also it prompted Alain Vigneault to give a coach’s version of ‘Bah! Humbug!’ ”
“As much as it might have looked that we gave a pass on the prior game, there is definitely not a pass on this one here,” Vigneault said. “We need quite a few players to up their level. This is a challenging league and to win, you better play well. Tonight we didn’t have enough guys playing well.
“There’s no excuse for tonight. We had one line — Step’s line — that gave its ‘A’ game,” Vigneault said in referring to the Chris KreiderDerek Stepan-Mats Zuccarello unit that was zoned in from the start and was in on all four New York goals. “When you’re playing a team that’s won nine in a row, you have to bring your best and we had one line going.
“The rest just weren’t good enough, from the goaltender on out.”
The goaltender was Henrik Lundqvist. At least it was until he yielded three goals — on two of which he looked bad — on four shots within the first 4:55 of the second period. That was after he had surrendered a soft one to Mikael Granlund midway through the first period that allowed the Wild to tie it 1-1 after Kreider had opened the scoring at 3:54.
The goaltender the rest of the way was Antti Raanta after Lundqvist was pulled for the second time this season, having allowed four goals on 13 shots in 24:55.
“I have to play more on my toes,” Lundqvist said. “It’s been a different week, that’s for sure, with just one practice, but I’m not going to blame anything. I just have to find the way to be more on my toes in a game like this.”
The first period was acceptable, even if the Rangers did appear to quiver after the softie tied it. But the Blueshirts simply didn’t have it in them in the second to compensate for Lundqvist’s poor night, and they simply drowned in a sea of lethargy.
Stepan said these twin routs, in which the Rangers conspired to allow as many as seven goals in consecutive games for the first time since early in the 1987-88 season (Oct. 31 in an 8-2 loss to the Islanders at the Coliseum and Nov. 1 in a 6-2 Garden defeat to the Oilers), do not change his opinion of this 23-12-1 team. But neither was he whistling into the winter wonderland.
“I’m still very confident in this group and that we’re a good hockey club, but there needs to be some serious thought through this break,” the alternate captain told The Post. “We weren’t even close this week. Two games and we were not even in the ballpark. Not even close.
“It just snowballed on us and it started in Pitt. If there is one thing you cannot do in this league it is to have two straight games where you come with ‘C’ performances. You have to be able to respond. We didn’t.”
The Ryan McDonagh-Dan Girardi pair had another tough night. Kevin Klein struggled again. Kevin Hayes and J.T. Miller continued their downward spin after such encouraging first quarters of their respective seasons. The players up front getting the opportunity to make their marks in the absence of Rick Nash, Mika Zibanejad and Pavel Buchnevich — guys like Oscar Lindberg, Brandon Pirri and Matt Puempel — are not cutting it. For the first time, really, these Rangers looked too much like last year’s team.
“They beat us to a lot of pucks in our own zone and made us pay,” McDonagh said. “Certainly we need to repeat the things that we talk about — trying to play close, support and take care of the areas in front of our net. We need to take a step back and realize what makes us successful. We can’t be flooding and leaving before the puck is out of our zone. Teams are going to make us pay like they have the last two games.”
Teams will make the Rangers pay if this season morphs into the Ghost of 2015-16, there is no doubt about that.