CUTTING IT CLOSE
Afterward, Dan Girardi had a gash on his ankle from a blocked shot and the Broadway Hat atop his head. Henrik Lundqvist was soaked through with sweat, wearing a tired smile after carrying the team on his back for large portions of the game. The Rangers were badly outshot, and it was even worse when it came to shot attempts.
Yet they still won, a 4-1 victory over the Ducks at the Garden on Tuesday, a game that was a throwback, a game maybe they shouldn’t have won — but did. “Vintage,” Girardi called it. The Rangers (34-18-1) have now taken the first two games of this four-game homestand, all against these big-bodied Western Conference teams that like to possess the puck and play physical. The Ducks (28-17-10) were no exception, holding the play so much they outshot the Blueshirts, 44-20, and out-attempted them, 83-40.
But Lundqvist was steady in making a season-high 43 saves, as his team allowed him to see most of the shots from the outside and he controlled most of the rebounds.
“He likes lots of work,” defenseman Marc Staal joked, “so we decided just to give him a little extra tonight.”
In reality, this is no way to keep going about the season. That sentiment was clearly expressed on the dour face of coach Alain Vigneault, who won career game No. 600, but hardly liked the way No. 178 with the Rangers came about.
“You have to manage the puck,” Vigneault said. “Our puck management wasn’t as sharp as it needed to be, which forced us to try and hit home-run [passes], and end up with long shifts and faceoffs in our own end.”
Nevertheless, the Rangers managed to take advantage of their opportunities when they came. Oscar Lindberg got his second goal of the season just 4:01 into the first period for a 1-0 lead during an opening 20 minutes when the Rangers were outshot, 16-6. Then Mats Zuccarello made it 2-0 at 1:06 of the second period, a frame in which they were outshot 16-7.
“They had the puck from the start of the game, and for a lot of the game,” Staal said. “We just couldn’t get in on the forecheck, and they spent 20-25 seconds in our end, we get tired, dump it [in], and do the same thing over again. One of those games. The penalties didn’t help, either.”
That would be four total, equaling eight minutes of man-advantage time for the Ducks, all of which the Rangers killed over the final 23:32 of the game.
There was the double-minor high stick on Brady Skjei late in the second, the questionable holding call on Chris Kreider early in the third and the shockingly inept delay-ofgame call on Kevin Hayes midway through the third, a puck that went over the Rangers bench, hit the glass and went out of play — but was a penalty anyway on what Hayes said was a call down from the league offices in Toronto.
“Especially on the penalty kill, there were a couple of really big plays at the right time,” said Lundqvist, who was aided by 23 blocked shots, a number out of the John Tortorella era. “Big plays at the right time helped us.”
Certainly that was the case after Jakob Silfverberg had cut the Rangers’ lead to 2-1 at 6:14 of the second period, and the pressure was on. Early in the third, Logan Shaw buried Derek Stepan face-first into the boards near the Anaheim bench. Though no penalty was called on the hit, the ensuing scrums resulted in 4-on-4 hockey, during which J.T. Miller made a great cross-ice pass to Michael Grabner, who went bar-down for his teamleading 24th of the season to make it 3-1.
Grabner then finished it off into the empty net in the waning moments, and this familiar and unsightly victory went into the books.
“It wasn’t a perfect game,” Lundqvist said. “I think everybody is just exhausted, [and] maybe we feel like we can play better. But we worked really hard and it paid off.”