COUNTING ON IT
Math doesn’t add up in ugly Rangers loss
LOS ANGELES — The Rangers right now are bad at just about everything. That, unfortunately, includes being bad at math.
For the third straight game and the fifth time in their first 11 matches, the Blueshirts could not count accurately to six and were assessed yet another too-many-men-on-the-ice minor.
There might be an excuse for being bad at scoring, might be an excuse for being bad at passing or skating. There is no excuse for being bad at adding one plus one plus one plus one plus one plus the goalie and failing to come up with the right number.
“It’s mental,” Kevin Hayes told The Post. “I don’t know if maybe guys get too excited and jump on early. Nobody wants that, but it shouldn’t happen. It can’t happen.” Guess what? It is happening, over and over and over again.
This one was a major contributor to the 4-3 defeat inflicted on the Blueshirts by the Kings here Sunday afternoon, when Alec Martinez — the name might ring a bell — took advantage of a fleet of defenders backing in to blast a 40-footer through Brendan Smith’s legs and past a startled Henrik Lundqvist with 54.6 seconds remaining in regulation.
The victory in this match between two of the NHL’s worst three teams by the standings ended a Los Angeles six-game regulation losing streak in which the team had been outscored by an aggregate 29-8. The defeat dropped the Rangers to 3-7-1 overall, 1-3-1 in their last five and 0-4-1 on the road with games in San Jose on Tuesday and Anaheim on Thursday remaining on this trip.
David Quinn was angry. He should be. The coach needs to clear up whatever the confusion has been that has generated these bench minors. Thing is, though, he seems to know exactly what the problem is but has decided not to share.
“I’m going to keep that to myself,” he said, growing angrier and angrier in a postmortem that included the words, “At the end of the day, we have to stop beating ourselves.
“It’s hard enough in this league to beat teams without beating yourself. It has to stop. It’s on me.”
The Rangers had led 2-0 early in the second period off goals from Vlad Namestnikov and Tony DeAngelo. If they were not exactly in control, they were in a good spot against a team playing with almost no confidence. But then Cody McLeod took a senseless slashing penalty 50 feet away from the net and the Kings had cut the lead to 2-1 on Dustin Brown’s power-play goal at 11:23.
Seventy-eight seconds later, the Rangers were hit with the bench minor. Ilya Kovalchuk then tied it with a one-time rocker at 13:41. Two goals on bad penalties — and insufficient penalty killing — within 1:51 and the Rangers were in danger.
“I felt like the game changed a lot with those two penalties,” Lundqvist said. “They got energy and they got confidence. They cashed in.”
The Rangers were outshot 27-13 through two periods and out-attempted 44-25 at five-on-five. Their new line combinations generated little, though Namestnikov (who started with Brett Howden and Pavel Buchnevich) and Ryan Spooner (on the line with Hayes and Chris Kreider) both stepped up their respective games.
Indeed, it was Spooner whose drive off a nifty DeAngelo cross-ice feed beat Campbell to tie the score 3-3 at 15:16 of the third after Dale Lewis had stuffed in a rebound to give LA the lead at 10:14. That gave the Blueshirts three five-on-five goals after they had scored five in their previous six games. But still. “It’s tough, we scored three goals, we worked hard,” said Lundqvist. “We came back in the end.”
And they lost in the end when the club allowed Martinez to part the Blue Sea and walk in uncontested before beating the netminder.
“We have to stop letting people skate by us in the neutral zone,” Quinn said. “We are not defending with urgency. We let people walk right by us.”
The challenge will be for the Rangers not to allow teams to walk right over them. Defending with urgency would be a start. So would establishing some kind of credible down-low ground game. These things are difficult.
But do you know what should not be difficult?
Counting to six.