Thursday night at the Coliseum, the Rangers ran all around their own end and lacked discipline, and last night at the Garden they had all sorts of trouble generating an attack against the Islanders.
And yet, doing what they have done best over this season that’s now more than a third old, the Rangers won them both, 6-5 on Long Island and 2-0 on Manhattan Island.
They may not have quite enough skill, player-by-player or position-by-position, but the Blueshirts have a talent that is indispensable in the NHL: They know how to win.
“We’re always ready to play,” said Marc Staal, whose power-play rocket from the top at 4:33 of the second period stood alone on the scoreboard until Brian Boyle salted it with an empty-netter. “And that’s a great feeling to have going into a game.”
The sweep of the downtrodden Islanders boosted the Rangers to 4-1 in their past five games, 9-4 in their past 13 and 16-11-1 overall. Only the Capitals (18), Penguins (17), Red Wings (17) and Canadiens (16) have as many victories as the Rangers, who are five points behind Washington in the, uh, race for the, uh, Presidents’ Trophy.
“I think the best thing is that we’ve been able to win different types of games,” Brandon Dubinsky said. “We’ve focused on being a physical group. Everybody chips in and everybody plays hard. We want to grind all night, and when we do that, it wears down our opponents.
“We’re not pretty, but we’re focused on creating an identity as a hard team to play against that finds ways to win.”
If Thursday was the equivalent of an aerial assault, last night was tantamount to 3 yards and a cloud of dust. The Sean Avery-Erik Christensen-Marian Gaborik unit, dominant at the Coliseum, was pedestrian at home, with Avery meeting up with blind justice in the form of the invariably incorrect referee Bill McCreary, who cost No. 16 12 minutes in the box bridging the first and second periods with a bogus roughing call followed by a misconduct.
The Rangers slogged through most of the second period up, 1-0, then contended with a spirited Islanders push through the opening minutes of the third. Henrik Lundqvist recorded 17 saves in his fourth shutout, the best likely on a John Tavares (remember him, hockey world?) wrist shot from the slot off a power-play rush late in the second.
“I felt like we were the better team the whole game, but it was a one-goal game,” Lundqvist said. “You never relax — you have to be ready.”
The Rangers have had their hiccups — against Colorado, Tampa Bay, an ineffectual performance Monday against the Penguins — but they don’t turn them into an epidemic of, say, whooping cough.
“The big thing to me with regards to the season is that whatever our record is, it’s not like we have it because we started the season 10-1 or something like that, the way we have the last couple of years before going into a lull,” said Dubinsky, whose team opened 7-1 last year and 10-2-1 two years ago before crashing.
“If we lose a game, we’re a hungry team the next night, ready to avenge the loss. The biggest thing for us, and every guy in this room will say the same thing, is consistency.”
The biggest thing is winning games.