Rangers finish off four-game sweep of New Jersey Devils
NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — Another birthday for the New York Rangers. Another big day for the birthday boy.
A day after Pavel Buchnevich scored a hat trick on his big day, Mika Zibanejad celebrated his 28th birthday and helped the Rangers cap a fourgame sweep of the Devils with a game-winning, power-play goal with three minutes to play in a 5-3 win on Sunday.
The win kept New York four points behind Boston in the East with 11 games left in the regular season. The Bruins, who have played two fewer games, beat Washington 6-3 earlier Sunday.
“We put ourselves in a good spot so we try to take the game one at a time,” said Zibanejad after the Rangers extended their season-high point streak to six games (5-0-1). “Sounds very cliche but that’s all we can do. Just worry about the next game and try to get the two points and move on, but that’s our focus right now.”
The Rangers haven’t made life easy on themselves. They opened a four-goal lead on Saturday and saw New Jersey get within one, and then had a three-goal lead Sunday only to see the Devils tie the game.
“We found a way to get it done,” Rangers coach David Quinn said. “Playing a team four times in a row and you come up with four wins, I don’t care what it looks like, I don’t care how many leads you blew, I don’t care; it doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t if you find ways to win and that’s what we did.”
Chris Kreider, Vitali Kravtsov, Alexis Lafreniere and Ryan Strome also scored for the Rangers, who are 13-4-3 in their past 20 games. Alexandar Georgiev, who had to leave the ice late in the first period when his knee locked after being hit by a shot, returned at the start of the second period and finished with 25 saves.