THE BITTER END
Rangers’ nightmare season coming to end against Flyers
PHILADELPHIA — It was hard for Henrik Lundqvist not to let out a little wry smile, but he still knew the final game of a very difficult season will be about far more than just a shot at long-forgotten revenge.
Yet as Lundqvist leads the Rangers onto the ice at Wells Fargo Center for the regular-season finale Saturday afternoon, and with the Flyers needing just one point to clinch a playoff spot — only able to miss if the Panthers also can win both of their remaining games in regulation — it’s darn near impossible not to harken back to a very similar situation in 2010.
That would be when the Rangers went down to the same building needing to win their final game of the season to get into the playoffs. Instead, after Lundqvist made 46 saves in regulation, he couldn’t stop Danny Briere and Claude Giroux in the shootout and they lost. It became the only time Lundqvist missed the playoffs since coming into the NHL in 2005-06 — until this season, that is.
“I obviously remember being in that building with a lot on the line a few years ago and it did not go the way we wanted,” Lundqvist said after the Rangers’ final practice of the season in Tarrytown on Friday. “For us who were there, I think going into [Saturday], we want to play a really strong game, for ourselves and also for that reason. They got a big win at a crucial time that time. We’re going to play a desperate and a really good team [Saturday].”
Yet that is hardly what it’s all about for these Rangers, who are in the midst of a rebuilding process that internally is a strange situation. A lot is in question this summer, from the status of coach Alain Vi- gneault to the future of the roster, from veterans down to draft picks.
Playing spoiler is akin to moral victories, and that’s not exactly something the Rangers are too interested in.
“At the end of the day, we’ve talked about doing our jobs right down to the end, since we’ve been eliminated, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” Vigneault said. “We went out [Friday], had a short practice, but execution was good, the intensity was good. We’re going to go to Philly and try to win a game.”
Of course, winning another game would once again lessen the Rangers’ already-slim odds at getting into the draft lottery, and would at the very least set them back in the order. After Thursday night’s 2-1 loss to the Islanders in Brooklyn, they were in 21st place in the league, and the lowest they could fall — as in, the higher they could draft — would be to 23rd place, if both the Blackhawks and Oilers win out.
So it almost has been bittersweet the Blueshirts are a surprising 7-8-3 since the Feb. 26 trade deadline, which followed a miserable stretch of 5-15-1 defined by the surrounding anxiety of what eventually became a whirlwind of trades. Yet general manager Jeff Gorton has done what he can to best restock for the future, and that is where the organizational focus is — even if it’s not there in the locker room quite yet.
“It’s a little weird, I must admit, to sit here, last game, last practice,” Lundqvist said. “It’s been a season of a lot of ups and downs. The second half here, we’ve talked a lot about it, it’s been a difficult time, no doubt about it. You try to put in all you got down the stretch.”
And if that means getting a little bit of redemption from something that happened eight years ago, then that will at least make the immediate entry into the summer a little less sour.
“Obviously we came up short here,” Lundqvist said. “We’re going to have a lot of time here to reflect and analyze this the right way. But let’s focus on [Saturday] and try to have a good game. And then we’ll sit down next week and the weeks after that and look at things that we need to improve.”