SABRE PAINS
After watching his team get manhandled by the last-place team in the Eastern Conference, coach Alain Vigneault had stern words for the Rangers, who had come in winners of three straight, but failed to show up on Tuesday.
“I don’t want to take anything away from the opposition, but there’s no doubt we didn’t do a good enough job in preparing our team for tonight’s game,” Vigneault said after the Rangers were roughed up in a 4-1 defeat to the Sabres in front of a stunned crowd at Madison Square Garden.
“I’ve mentioned it many times that there are no easy games in this league and we weren’t ready when the game started.”
That was evident in part by the fact they didn’t register a shot on goal until halfway through the first and looked lost for most of the first 20 minutes.
“Our execution was nonexistent,” Vigneault said. “We didn’t have a [defenseman] that could make a pass and our compete level was not good enough. I haven’t said this very often about this group since I’ve been here, but this was a very bad game where we got outworked badly and we’re going to need to respond here.”
And that has to happen quickly, as the Rangers travel to play the Flyers for a game on Wednesday night. The coach said he would watch the video of Tuesday’s game on the way to Philadelphia to determine whether lineup changes would be necessary.
Perhaps that fast turnaround is the best thing for a team that looked as bad as it did at home against Buffalo.
Henrik Lundqvist gave up a pair of first-period goals and a Kevin Klein turnover early in the second turned into a Justin Bailey goal to give last-place Buffalo a 3-0 lead.
A one-timer by Nick Holden made it 3-1 at 15:55 of the second to give the Rangers a bit of life, but that was soon dashed when Jack Eichel scored a power-play goal after Jimmy Vesey was called for hooking just 18 seconds into the third.
“You could tell the first 10 minutes of the game, they were hungry,” Lundqvist said. “They came
with a lot of speed and desperation in their game. A lot of times, that’s what’s going to win you hockey games. It kind of set the tone.”
It was Buffalo’s fourth goal on just 15 shots — while the Rangers managed to not test Anders Nilsson again for much of the third.
“They outworked us there in the first, no question about it,” Ryan McDonagh said. “There’s no excuse for that. We prepare ourselves for every game and we didn’t do that tonight. It’s a lesson learned.”
The captain made it clear he didn’t think the team shot, passed or fought well enough.
“In all ways, we didn’t execute,” McDonagh said. “You can cross about everything off the list. We talk about how we’re trying to be sharp and that didn’t happen.”
The fact that they’re chasing Columbus and Pittsburgh in the Metropolitan Division makes losses like this one to a struggling Sabres team all the more puzzling.
“This is a team we could have controlled the play [against] and imposed our will on them and do good things,” Dan Girardi said. “[But] we waited to see rather than start.”
And he believes they need to analyze how it happened.
“Everyone kind of has to look at themselves and see what went wrong,” Girardi
His goaltender, though, knows they can’t afford to dwell too much on this lopsided defeat.
“In a game like this, we need one or two big saves and it might be a different game,” Lundqvist said. “I don’t think we should get stuck with this one.”