Wojtek Wolski’s goal hatched magically from underneath Brian Boucher like the idea the Rangers had run into a goalie who could give them the help they increasingly need.
Less than 13 minutes past a sleepy 12:30 p.m. start, the Rangers had the Flyers — playing their fourth road game in six days — in a foxhole with a netminder having even more trouble finding the puck than John Tortorella has had finding Marian Gaborik, never mind a center to play with him.
Wojtek’s goal already was one more than the Rangers had scored in New Jersey on Friday night. And with Boucher leaving pucks in the crease in front of him, behind him, and to both sides of him, opportunity knocked harder than even Torts was knocking Henrik Lundqvist a few weeks back, when the Rangers’ current 2-7-1 skid was incubating.
So even conceding the depth of scoring on the Eastern Conference-leading Flyers, it still was hard to fathom that the Rangers, thanks to an adept redirection by Jeff Carter, a quick backhand passout by Carter to Claude Giroux, and a Dan Carcillo badboy that went right through Lundqvist, would still find themselves being booed off the ice at the end of the second period.
The Rangers, down 3-1, should have taken that as a hint they were not playing nearly as well as they later insisted, nor were they having as much bad luck around the goal as they would imply. In fact, they couldn’t have gotten any more fortunate when, one minute after Boucher suffered a third-period stinger at the knee of his defenseman Kimmo Timonen, the goalie let a puck Dan Girardi put off the backboards go between his legs through the crease for a Derek Stepan tap-in.
“I couldn’t feel my hand,” Boucher said. “My whole right arm was numb. [Trainer] Jimmy [McCrossin] came out and said, ‘It’s gonna come back. It’s gonna come back.’ ”
The Rangers didn’t come back before the feeling in the goalie’s arm came back. They got some more pucks to Boucher’s two left feet, but not enough before Kris Versteeg’s empty-netter sealed a 4-2 win the Flyers didn’t have to do much to earn.
“The numbness is gone [now], but it still feels kind of weak,” said Boucher, a goalie playing with one arm essentially able to hold off a team playing with no hands.
And not much confidence either.
The third-period comeback magic is gone. Now, so is Gaborik, who after the first period came out of the game after having complained intermittently of not feeling well for about a week.
A concussion is now suspected, which would account for only bad one week of what has been a dreadful season by what used to be one the game’s most dynamic scorers. And of course, whatever the doctor says, he still won’t be able to explain how the Rangers can score enough goals to get to the postseason without their one game-changing player.
“The belief in this team gets stronger for me,” Tortorella said. “I think they worked their tails off.”
Spoken like a coach who feels the need for some artificial injections of confidence. In truth, the Rangers didn’t work hard enough yesterday to get the matinee crowd out of its seats, draw a single penalty from the NHL’s eighth-most penalized team, nor erase increasing doubts about their ability to get the season turned back around.