Postseason will live or die by King’s play
ST. PAUL, Minn. — It wasn’t exactly a criticism when Rangers coach Alain Vigneault said last week that his team had gone up and down in concert with the performance of his goaltenders, which almost always meant Henrik Lundqvist.
It was not so much a shot at Lundqvist’s roller-coaster season, which has had stretches that both question his future viability with his 36th birthday coming in March and also made him worthy of consideration for the Vezina Trophy. And it also wasn’t a shot at the sporadic performances of backup Ondrej Pavelec, who is now set to miss the next two-to-three weeks with a MCL sprain in his knee suffered in the first period of Friday’s 4-3 win over the Flames at the Garden.
Instead, Vigneault was relaying a fact about his team — it doesn’t quite have the depth of talent to overcome anything less than absolute excellence in nets.
Now with the selloff coming before the Feb. 26 trade deadline, the Rangers are still hanging on to a very reasonable hope that they will make the playoffs. Since the front office announced its plans publicly Thursday, the Blueshirts have won two gutty games — the most recent a hard-fought and well-earned 3-1 win over a good Jets team in Winnipeg on Sunday afternoon — starting this road trip that continues Tuesday night against another stout Western opponent, the Wild.
Lundqvist is set to get his 47th start of the first 57 games, while his team woke up for a day of rest of Monday just two points out of the second wild-card spot (albeit with three teams to leapfrog). There is a chance Alexandar Georgiev, who was called up from AHL Hartford on Saturday on his 22nd birthday to take Pavelec’s spot, might start — maybe in Ottawa on Saturday afternoon on the first leg of a matinee back-toback that concludes with a noon Garden match against the Flyers on Sunday.
Georgiev earned his call-up by posting a 8-0-1 record, along with a 1.76 goals-against average and a .948 save percent in his past nine games for the Wolf Pack. But there is little question that if the Rangers want to get back in this race just for the sake of their own competitiveness, it’s going to be Lundqvist who gets them there.
“Georgie has been in Hartford, but he’s a skilled guy. We’ll see if he gets a start here,” Lundqvist said Sunday night. “But I’ll just take it game-by-game, we’ll see what game it’s going to be. But not too many back-to-backs, hopefully we can play really well and get wins here. That’ll energize us — as long as we’re winning.”
It’s always been about winning for Lundqvist — and if that means he gives up a few goals but makes the big save at the big time, he’ll take it. Just like how he surrendered the first goal of the game to the Jets on the second shot of the game — twice. Once it came off the scoreboard after Vigneault challenged and won an offsides, and the second stood. It was the 12th time this season Lundqvist has given up a goal on one of the first three shots he faced in a game.
But he made a jaw-dropping save on Tyler Myers late in the second period when his post-to-post speed looked as good as ever, showing his technical prowess and ability to read the play has not diminished. Then he showed his own battle level when he was sprawled out and got a stick on a Mathieu Perreault attempt with less than 10 seconds remaining in the game.
The Rangers are a flawed team, and that is why management is doing the right thing in rebuilding. But right now, the Rangers still want to win — and the results are reliant, more than ever, on Lundqvist being great every night.
The Rangers announced Monday they have recalled defenseman Ryan Sproul from the AHL Wolf Pack. He takes the spot of defenseman Steven Kampfer, who will be out four-to-six weeks with a fractured hand.