Upping the Antti
Rangers crown Kings behind Raanta's gem
LOS ANGELES — While so many of the names were the same, the implications of this meeting between the Rangers and Kings on Saturday night could not have been more different.
For even as 11 of the visitors and 14 from the home squad remained on their respective teams’ rosters three years after the five-game Stanley Cup final won by Los Angeles, this simply was a water-colored, regular-season, wind-down matchup with the Rangers all but locked into the East’s first wildcard spot and the Kings well back of the West’s second wild-card berth.
The Blueshirts were seeking to break out of a malaise through which they had gone 2-3-2 in the seven games since Henrik Lundqvist — scheduled to get the start in Anaheim on Sunday — went down with a hip injury March 7 and 5-6-2 over the past month.
They were able to do so off a much more committed, if imperfect, effort through which they worked hard on a straight-line forecheck game and adopted a shoot-first, net-front mentality that had been absent for too long.
The 3-0 victory, backed by a superb 30-save effort by Antti Raanta — who now resumes his understudy role — reduced the Rangers’ playoff-clinching magic number to two, as in a combination of points gained and Islanders points lost.
“He was unbelievable,” Rick Nash told The Post. “He is calm back there. He doesn’t give up many rebounds. He smothers it a lot. I think he could be the No. 1 goalie for a lot of teams I totally believe that. We are lucky to have that.”
Dan Girardi returned after a 12game absence and was paired with matchup sidekick Ryan McDonagh. Tested immediately, Girardi played a two-on-one well with 7:01 remaining in the scoreless first period, forcing Tyler Toffoli to shoot from the right wing after McDonagh had been caught on a left-wall pinch. Raanta handled the shot, the Kings’ first in a span of 10:22, with ease.
Coach Alain Vigneault reunited the Michael Grabner-Kevin Hayes-J.T. Miller unit after a fourgame trial separation, and the line dominated on the forecheck. Grabner had a pair of glorious first-period opportunities in front and another on a breakaway after picking Marian Gaborik at the defensive line. But No. 40 missed the net as he did on one of his two point-blank chances. The winger, who still leads the team with 27 goals, has scored once in his last 17 contests.
The Rangers were unable to carry their first-period momentum into the second period, though. The Kings dominated with a down-low grinding game that kept the Blueshirts pinned for much of the middle 20 minutes, but Raanta was up to the task, battling through traffic and scrambles and, most notably, stopping Toffoli in alone at 7:35 and Nic Dowd on a semi-break with 9:25 to go.
“The last few games, it was like I was as all over the place,” Raanta said. “I was trying to fix that. I was inside my crease and a lot of pucks came to me. It worked out pretty good.”
Held in the contest by their netminder, the Rangers took a 1-0 lead at 13:02, when Derek Stepan converted a ricochet off the back boards from the left porch after Brendan Smith’s point shot zinged wide. Mats Zuccarello, who won a battle with Anze Kopitar to feed Smith, enabled the entire sequence by racing to negate an icing infraction.
McDonagh scored on the power play through traffic provided by Chris Kreider and Mika Zibanejad at 1:50 of the second period for a 2-0 lead. Rick Nash’s empty-net goal, his 21st of the season with 1:08 to play in the game capped the Blueshirts scoring.
“I know I’ve said it a lot, but in our group, we want to be hit on all cylinders at the end of these two weeks,” Stepan said. “I think this was a good step for us.”
McDonagh and Girardi are two of the holdovers from the 2014 run to the Cup final. So are Marc Staal and Kreider, who in retrospect offered decidedly different takes on the defeat.
“I kind of have a mixture of pride and disappointment if I think back on it, which I absolutely do,” the 30-year-old Staal told The Post. “Knowing how much it takes, I have pride in what we accomplished to get there, I have an appreciation for that.
“But what stands out most is the missed opportunity. When I go back and replay the games in my mind, I think about all of the opportunities we had to win those games, all the could-have-beens that went the other way.”
Kreider, though, looks at it from the other side.
“I look back with fond memories,” the winger told The Post. “Of course there’s a sense of disappointment, but I think much more about how we had a really good team, a really good room and a really good group.