OH, Z! larry.brooks@nypost.com
This was about as entertaining and high-octane as it gets these days when the Rangers and Devils meet. The clubs from either side of the Hudson combined for 77 shots — 39 for New York — in a racehorse display that the Blueshirts owned for 38 minutes, had taken away from them through a staccato burst late in the second and early in the third, then finally claimed for good when Mika Zibanejad scored at 1:16 of overtime.
“I think it was a little bit of us slipping and a little bit of them stepping it up,” Derek Stepan said after the Rangers weathered a three-goal New Jersey storm within 2:46, bridging the second and third periods to record a 4-3 overtime victory in Newark on Saturday. “I think we were doing a lot of good things and then it got away from us a bit.
“It got wild in the third with how open it was. I bet both teams wanted to be able to baton down the hatches a little bit.”
The Rangers, 9-1-1 in their past 11 and 10-2 in their past 12 on the road, remained in third place in the Metro, one point ahead of the Blue Jackets, who hold two games in hand and will be at the Garden on Sunday. The Devils, 14th in the conference, frit- tered away a vital point in their unlikely playoff quest by first allowing Adam Clendening to get the tying goal at 15:35 of the third before then yielding the winner.
“We talk a lot about how we have to break it when the other team gets momentum and create our own,” said Zibanejad, whose five-hole conversion of a Brady Skjei headman feed broke a 15game drought two days after he had gotten the shootout winner in Toronto. “You’ve got to go back to getting zone time and getting the puck to the net. We did that well at the end.”
The Rangers controlled most of the first two periods, building a 2-0 lead that seemed impenetrable on firstperiod goals from Chris Kreider and Oscar Lindberg.
But Adam Henrique scored on a wraparound at 18:28 of the second, Kyle Palmieri scored on a screened wrister off the rush (and Raanta’s glove) at 0:27 of the third then Palmieri got another one on a power play deflection at 1:14, and somehow the Rangers were trailing, 3-2.
he Devils iced the puck at 15:21, setting up a Rangers offensive zone draw that began the sequence on which Clendening drove one past Schneider to tie it from the right circle.
The Devils created the first chance in OT when Palmieri broke in on the left. But Raanta stayed with him and made a skate save at 1:05. Shortly thereafter, the Rangers broke the other way, Skjei getting the puck ahead to Zibanejad on the right.
“I looked up and Mika was calling for it,” Skjei said. “I just want to get it up to our skill guys.”
Zibanejad faked a shot, Cory Schneider opened up, and No. 93 slid the puck fivehole to break his drought that stretched back to Jan. 17, when he scored twice in his first game back following a twomonth absence due to a broken fibula.
“I feel like the last three of four games I’m back to being me,” Zibanejad said. “I didn’t know what the count was but then I heard it the other night. I didn’t want to hear it again.”