Last night, for the first time in a long time, the Rangers looked like a pretty good team that may have to be reckoned with the rest of the way in a weak Eastern Conference.
It wasn’t only that the Blueshirts defeated the Panthers 4-1 at the Garden to extend their overall winning streak to four games while snapping their home losing streak at five (0-4-1), it was the manner in which they did it in this final game before the NHL’s two-day Christmas break.
For the Rangers — the eighth-place Rangers, that is! — took the body, won more than their share of battles, took care of their own end, moved well through the neutral zone on the rush, forechecked with authority and went hard to the net while receiving big performances from standard-bearers Henrik Lundqvist and Marian Gaborik.
It was indeed as complete a game as the Blueshirts have played in weeks, if not months, if not all season. General manager Glen Sather visited the postgame room with Christmas cheer rather than with lumps of coal for his players’ holiday stockings.
The mandate now is to pick up right here when they reconvene on Saturday for a Garden match against the Islanders.
“This kind of validated the three wins on the last trip,” said Chris Drury, who scored his third goal in the last four games and excelled in every aspect. “We talked before the game about how losing this one at home would undo a lot of the good things we’d done on the road, and I think you could tell how badly we wanted this one.
“But that has to be a constant after the break. We have to want every game as badly as we wanted this one. We have to have that same approach and work ethic every night. There’s no excuse for us not to.”
Lundqvist was outstanding in blanking the Puddy Tats for the final 55:51 following a rebound goal on which the Blueshirts fell quickly behind. The King stopped the final 33 shots he faced in holding an opponent to two goals or fewer for the sixth straight game and ninth of the last 10.
“I feel really good,” said Lundqvist, who has started 32 of 37 games. “The last 10 games, this is the way I should play and have to play for us to be as successful as we can be.”
The Rangers knotted the game just 2:13 after Florida took the lead on a Drury one-timer that came off a feed from Enver Lisin after the winger used his speed to negate an icing. Vinny Prospal broke a 14-game scoreless streak by going to the net to bury a power play rebound early in the second before getting one at even strength in the first minute of the third.
Gaborik completed the scoring with his league-leading 26th while the Rangers were shorthanded yet operating on a delayed penalty call when Drury was tripped in the neutral zone after breaking up a Panther play.
Meanwhile, coach John Tortorella reunited his Marc Staal-Dan Girardi shutdown pair to match against Florida’s Michael Frolik-Stephen Weiss-Nathan Horton top line. The defensive pair, which had skated together just once since Nov. 28 — against Detroit’s Tomas Holmstrom-Pavel Datsyuk-Henrik Zetterberg line on Dec. 6 — was excellent.
Their work mirrored the team’s work on this night on which the Rangers looked like a playoff team.