Bummer on B’way
AFTER riding the high of their Winter Classic win, the Rangers on Wednesday night came crashing back down to Earth.
The sluggish Blueshirts were vastly outplayed and suffered through a letdown two days after their rousing win at Citi Field, falling to the Blackhawks, 5-2.
“I saw one team playing hockey and the other chasing the whole night,” Ryan McDonagh said. “It’s really disappointing. We know we are coming off a big emotional win and a big stage, but we’re almost at the halfway point of the season where we need to start playing with some consistency, and we didn’t give ourselves a chance there.
“They were able to do whatever they wanted. We didn’t finish checks, slow them down. … They had time and space and we left our goalie out to dry.”
Summed up well by the captain, who was the only Ranger with a positive shot-attempts differential in this game in which the Rangers (21-14-5) were somehow in the game all the way until Chicago (19-14-6) potted two empty-netters in the final minute.
A lack of consistency, any slip-ups for even a short duration, can loom large in the nip-and-tuck Metropolitan Division.
“Shouldn’t be. There should not be, at all,” Henrik Lundqvist, who made 30 saves, said of a possible Winter Classic hangover. “We need to understand the situation of where we are three games before the (bye week), so that definitely should not be an excuse. We need to be ready to play.”
They weren’t. The Rangers allowed the Blackhawks to play the speed and skill game they usually try to impose by being slow and careless. They barely tested Chicago’s 32-year-old rookie goaltender Jeff Glass, who made just his third career NHL appearance.
And yet twice they tied the game. Mika Zibanejad’s 5-on-3 power-play goal at 11:32 of the second tied it up at 2, less than three minutes after a controversial Chicago goal.
Ryan Hartman cross-checked Marc Staal after Lundqvist saved Nick Schmaltz’s shot, sending Staal tumbling into the net and taking the loose puck with him across the goal line right before the net came off its moorings. A penalty inexplicably wasn’t called, and video review confirmed the officials’ decision of a good goal. Patrick Sharp’s goal off the rush 2:24 into the third stood up as the winner.
“We’ve just got to play with a little more urgency,” Brady Skjei said.
Much more, as they now have to beat the impending storm out to the desert for a two-game weekend trip in Arizona and Vegas, their final two games before their bye week, with the task of improving upon their 6-7-2 road record — which includes Monday’s win in Flushing.
“You come in here, you try and say some things and get it turned around, but it can’t be one or two guys trying to make a difference,” McDonagh said. “We need everybody on the same page out there playing at the same level of intensity.”